In the past decade, the financial services sector has seen that its businesses are vulnerable to a variety of threats from within or from external events that can interrupt business briefly or over the course of days.  Regulatory entities, inter-agency working groups, and industry associations have set forth important objectives and standards that must be met in order to assure protection of critical financial infrastructure and organizational resilience.  These standards range from mandatory compliance protocols to voluntary adoption of best practice policies and procedures.  But to truly assure that progress has been made in managing risk and mitigating the impact of these threats, financial services enterprises need to conduct exercises that test both the policies and procedures as well as the executives who will have to manage events in real time.  Corporate war games and table top exercises are the only truly effective means of developing confidence in the procedures and mutual trust among the crisis management teams.  At Blue Water Partners, we understand these challenges and work with our Financial Services clients to develop realistic, relevant scenarios that will help them maintain and increase their preparedness and response capability for crisis management and business continuity.