Business Continuity Exercises
Specification
Follow a structured approach to evaluate the effectiveness of the business continuity and operational resilience plans at planned intervals or upon significant changes.
Threat coverage
Architectural relevance
Lifecycle
Data storage, Resource provisioning, Team and expertise
Not applicable
Not applicable
AI applications, Orchestration
Operations, Maintenance, Continuous monitoring
Archiving, Data deletion, Model disposal
Ownership / SSRM
PI
Shared across the supply chain
Shared control ownership refers to responsibilities and activities related to LLM security that are distributed across multiple stakeholders within the AI supply chain, including the Cloud Service Provider (CSP), Model Provider (MP), Orchestrated Service Provider (OSP), Application Provider (AP), and Customer (AIC). These controls require coordinated actions, communication, and governance across all involved parties to ensure their effectiveness.
Model
Owned by the Model Provider (MP)
The model provider (MP) designs, develops, and implements the control as part of their services or products to mitigate security, privacy, or compliance risks associated with the Large Language Model (LLM). Model Providers are entities that develop, train, and distribute foundational and fine-tuned AI models for various applications. They create the underlying AI capabilities that other actors build upon. Model Providers are responsible for model architecture, training methodologies, performance characteristics, and documentation of capabilities and limitations. They operate at the foundation layer of the AI stack and may provide direct API access to their models. Examples: OpenAI (GPT, DALL-E, Whisper), Anthropic(Claude), Google(Gemini), Meta(Llama), as well as any customized model.
Orchestrated
Shared Model Provider-Orchestrated Service Provider (Shared MP-OSP)
The MP and OSP are jointly responsible and accountable for the design, development, implementation, and enforcement of the control to mitigate security, privacy, or compliance risks associated with Large Language Model (LLM)/GenAI technologies in the context of the services or products they develop and offer.
Application
Owned by the Application Provider (AP)
The Application Provider (AP) is responsible for the design, development, implementation, and enforcement of the control to mitigate security, privacy, or compliance risks associated with Large Language Model (LLM)/GenAI technologies in the context of the services or products they develop and offer. The AP is responsible and accountable for the implementation of the control within its own infrastructure/environment. If the control has downstream implications on the users/customers, the AP is responsible for enabling the customer and/or upstream partner in the implementation/configuration of the control within their risk management approach. The AP is accountable for carrying out the due diligence on its upstream providers (e.g MPs, Orchestrated Services) to verify that they implement the control as it relates to the service/product develop and offered by the AP. These providers build and offer end-user applications that leverage generative AI models for specific tasks such as content creation, chatbots, code generation, and enterprise automation. These applications are often delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. These providers focus on user interfaces, application logic, domain-specific functionality, and overall user experience rather than underlying model development. Example: OpenAI (GPTs,Assistants), Zapier, CustomGPT, Microsoft Copilot (integrated into Office products), Jasper (AI-driven content generation), Notion AI (AI-enhanced productivity tools), Adobe Firefly (AI-generated media), and AI-powered customer service solutions like Amazon Rufus, as well as any organization that develops its AI-based application internally.
Implementation guidelines
Auditing guidelines
1. Examine the plans for business continuity and operational resilience tests, regarding their intended outputs. 2. Examine the schedules of such tests and their periodicity. 3. Evaluate if the plans are tested upon significant changes or at least annually. 4. Verify that the exercise scenarios include various infrastructure failure modes, including power outages, hardware failures, network disruptions, and regional disasters that affect AI processing capabilities. 5. Review exercise results and documentation to confirm that critical AI infrastructure components (compute, networking, storage) are included in the scope and that recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) were measured against established targets. 6. Assess documentation of lessons learned from exercises and verify that identified deficiencies in infrastructure resilience were documented in a corrective action plan with clear ownership and timelines. 7. Examine evidence that infrastructure redundancy mechanisms (e.g., failover systems, load balancing, backup power) were tested explicitly during exercises. 8. Verify that the appropriate management responsible for infrastructure operations reviewed and approved the exercise planning, execution, and results.
Standards mappings
ISO 27001 A.5.30 (ICT readiness for business continuity)
Addendum
There is no control in ISO 42001 that covers the AICM BCR-06 topic of exercising a BCP. However, there is coverage with 27001 A.5.30 ICT readiness for business continuity, where a BCP is required to be tested based on organization's risk appetite.
Article 16 Article 17(1) (d)
Addendum
Develop business continuity and operational resilience plans, conduct regular and event-driven exercises, include these in the QMS and technical documentation, and track lessons learned and updates.
MS-2.7-007 MP-5.1-005 GV-6.2-003
Addendum
Include an action that explicitly mandates that business continuity and disaster recovery plans be exercised at least annually (or upon significant changes) and that the results be used for continual improvement.
BCM-04
Addendum
N/A
AI-CAIQ questions (1)
Is a structured approach to evaluate the effectiveness of the business continuity and operational resilience plans, followed at planned intervals or upon significant changes?