Disaster Recovery Testing: What It Is, How It Works and Where To Start
You take pride in making sure that your company is prepared for any challenge—including disasters.
You already know the importance of backing up your data and securing your infrastructure, and you’ve worked with your IT team to create a system to anticipate and recover from an unforeseen event.
You’ve built a plan that you think is well positioned to minimize downtime and respond quickly.
But, will it actually work when you need it?
In today’s digital business environment, disaster recovery plans are a must. Most companies have created some sort of response system, but when a disaster strikes, many realize that their plans have gaps and missing pieces.
To ensure your disaster recovery plan covers all the bases and meets your current recovery objectives, you should regularly conduct disaster recovery testing.
What Is Disaster Recovery Testing?
Disaster recovery testing verifies the effectiveness of your disaster recovery plan to ensure your organization can restore data and applications to continue operations after a disruption, such as a natural disaster, IT failure or cyberattack.
The disaster recovery testing process simulates disruptive situations to assess how well your business’s systems, processes and operations can recover. It can help you identify weaknesses and areas for improvement to inform your business continuity strategy, improve business resiliency and comply with regulatory requirements.
Many organizations even have specific guidelines requiring their vendors and partners to have a verified disaster recovery plan. Documentation from disaster recovery testing can help you build trust and win more business.
How Does Disaster Recovery Testing Work?
Disaster recovery testing should start with an assessment to determine a baseline of what normal looks like for your business. It will locate all your assets, create an inventory of IT resources and identify mission-critical data and processes.
During disaster recovery testing, your IT team or an external vendor will simulate disruptive scenarios and evaluate if your systems, infrastructure and personnel can respond and recover promptly. Then, it’ll provide detailed documentation and recommendations to improve your disaster recovery procedures.
There are four types of disaster recovery testing:
Tabletop Exercise
Stakeholders walk through and discuss all the components in the disaster recovery plan. The process helps everyone understand what they should do in an emergency and uncovers inconsistencies or missing information in the plan.
Simulation Testing
Various disaster scenarios are simulated in a controlled environment to see if the disaster recovery plan works, ensuring your organization can resume business operations as quickly as possible.
Parallel Testing
This method brings your disaster recovery system online to verify that it can handle the required workload while keeping the primary system and infrastructure operational during the test.
Full-Scale Testing
Your IT team or provider will temporarily shift the entire infrastructure to the disaster recovery environment to validate that the disaster recovery process works and verify your overall readiness.
What Technology Elements Does Disaster Recovery Testing Evaluate?
Disaster recovery testing focuses on the following aspects of your IT infrastructure and processes to help ensure business resiliency:
System Failover
This is your infrastructure’s ability to switch to the backup system or alternate environment when a disruption occurs.
Data Backup and Recovery
This refers to the process of backing up data and restoring the file structure when a data loss or system failure happens.
Infrastructure Resilience
The ability of your servers, networks and storage systems to withstand, adapt to and recover from changing conditions.
Application Recovery
Your capabilities to access and restore applications from a backup system or alternate environment to support the anticipated workload.
Alerts and Notifications
The reliability and timeliness of communications to coordinate individuals involved in executing the disaster recovery plan.
How Can I Get Started With Disaster Recovery Testing?
Comprehensive disaster recovery testing must address all the moving parts and ensure they work together seamlessly.
Here’s an outline of the process:
1. Review/Update Your Disaster Recovery Plan
Before you begin the disaster recovery testing process, review your disaster recovery plan and make necessary updates based on your current IT infrastructure.
2. Identify Critical Systems and Data
Identify critical systems and information so you can prioritize what to protect and recover first in the event of a disaster. While you’re at it, eliminate redundant data, which could take up a lot of storage space and processing power and drive up IT costs while slowing down the recovery process.
3. Define Testing Objectives
Define your testing objectives, such as verifying that the plan meets your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).
4. Determine Your Testing Approach and Scenarios
Determine the approach and establish the scenarios to simulate (e.g., a natural disaster impacting access to your on-site server or a ransomware attack preventing employees from accessing data.)
5. Allocate Appropriate Resources
Allocate the appropriate resources to conduct disaster recovery testing. These include the hardware, software, personnel, third-party experts and time required to simulate the scenarios and assess the disaster recovery plan’s validity.
6. Document Your Process
Document the details of the testing process for review and future reference.
7. Conduct Your Test
Now, you’re ready to run the test. This will depend on the objectives you’ve outlined, the scenarios you’ve chosen, and what type of disaster recovery testing you’ll conduct.
8. Analyze Your Results
Gather data and analyze the disaster recovery testing results to gauge how well your disaster recovery plan was implemented and whether it meets your organization’s needs in the relevant scenario. Make adjustments where needed.
9. Repeat Testing and Maintain an Updated Plan
After you’ve made adjustments based on any weaknesses you identified during disaster recovery testing, it’s wise to test your revised plan again. You should perform disaster recovery testing regularly to ensure your disaster recovery plan can support an evolving IT infrastructure and growing data needs.
Get a Trusted Partner in Disaster Recovery Testing for Peace of Mind
You don’t want to realize something is missing when a disaster strikes.
A reputable partner can help you design and execute a disaster recovery plan, orchestrate all the moving parts and conduct the appropriate disaster recovery testing to cover all the bases.
Warren Averett Technology Group has extensive experience implementing the latest disaster recovery best practices and ensuring that your plan works as expected with rigorous disaster recovery testing.
Get in touch with us to provide your organization with a disaster recovery strategy that improves your business resilience and gives you peace of mind.
