A tabletop exercise in disaster recovery and business continuity testing is best described as what?

• A. A live fault injection drill in production systems
• B. A written theoretical policy review
• C. A discussion-based scenario walkthrough to evaluate response without affecting live systems
• D. An automated system failover test

Answer: (C)

It centers on evaluating how the incident response team would handle a simulated disaster through a guided discussion, without touching live systems. This kind of exercise uses a realistic scenario and facilitates a walk-through where participants talk through their actions, decisions, and communications as if the incident were real, while no production systems are altered. The emphasis is on how plans are executed: who calls the shots, how escalation and notification work, how information is shared with stakeholders, and how recovery priorities are set. That safe, discussion-based format makes it possible to spot gaps in procedures, roles, and timing, and to assign owners for follow-up tasks without risking service disruption. In contrast, a live fault injection drill would involve actually testing faults in production and could impact services; a written policy review is just a document review with no interactive assessment; and an automated failover test is a technical system exercise focused on whether systems switch over correctly, which may or may not involve the broader human response and decision-making aspects central to tabletop exercises.