Over the last few years, the Business Continuity Working Group has hosted a summer tabletop exercise as part of our annual “BCP-athon”. Members of the UofT community have joined us to work through two events: one related to a campus IT outage and another focused on a cyber security threat. (Our first tabletop’s theme was a pandemic, and was scheduled for March 13, 2020…and we all know how that turned out).
This year’s BCP Tabletop theme is a Rogers outage – wifi/internet/cellular – mimicking the July 8, 2022, outage which stymied us for ~15 hours. Rogers’ Director, Business Continuity and Enterprise Risk Management has agreed to facilitate the tabletop.
We are delighted to have been asked to expand the scope for this year’s exercise to incorporate our response to an incident from the very beginning and thus to involve a broader, incident management-related participant list. As a reminder, Business Continuity is not an emergency response plan but a plan to facilitate the recovery and resumption of critical functions following an event, so we had focussed our previous exercises on the activities ~72 hours post event and beyond.
The broadening of scope for this year’s Tabletop has attendees engaged from the moment of the incident, actively managing and participating as the event unfolds. For this year’s Tabletop, members of the BCP Working Group will be joined by members of the Office of Safety & High Risk (OSHR), University of Toronto Communications, the Offices of the President and the Vice-President & Provost, as well as colleagues from across the tri-campus who would normally be called upon to lead and support their areas during an incident.
We hope that you will consider attending the Tabletop on Tuesday, July 29, 2025 in the Lau Auditorium, Myhal Centre for Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 55 St. George Street.
For more details, and to register to attend, please go to the 2025 Incident Management Tabletop Registration Page. Please feel free to share this link with your colleagues.