Disaster recovery testing is an important element of an organization's business continuity and disaster recovery plan.
A disaster recovery test is an important element of an organization's business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan. It essentially involves assessing the steps within this BCDR plan to be prepared for operational disasters.
In this comprehensive guide, we'll look at how different types of disasters can affect businesses and the various aspects of DR testing, including recovery time, the testing process itself, DR best practices, the resources needed to implement recovery plans and more. We'll include a step-by-step plan to help review management objectives and enable seamless recovery processes.
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It can be difficult to categorize a disastrous event, but broadly speaking, disasters are either man-made or natural. So we could divide disasters loosely into even more sub-categories, allowing for some to present as 'hybrid'.
Wildfires, floods, hurricanes, mudslides, tornados and earthquakes are classed as natural disasters. Any disaster scenario that involves the elements can throw a business’s carefully laid plans and projections into serious disarray. Such catastrophic events can break supply chains, prevent employees from getting to work, and cause damage or destruction to vital facilities or equipment. That’s why disaster recovery planning should be just as high of a priority for organizations as having a proactive future growth plan.
We've put this in a category of it's own because while a pandemic classifies as a 'natural disaster', it crosses over into the category of man-made, and/or biological. While COVID hasn't caused physical damage to facilities or equipment, it has certainly prevented employees from getting to work, broken supply chains and destroyed the operational structure of business environments as we'd come to know them. If there's one thing that businesses have learned from this pandemic, it's that disaster recovery planning enables business continuity.
Operational disasters
There are many types of disasters that can affect a business's operations. For example, when an organization loses a significant manager, head of department or director. Businesses can also be affected by operational disasters when contracts are broken or a when a business environment becomes severely unfavorable for operating.
These types of disasters also have a profound effect on business operations. For example an event caused by malfunctioning technology, like network connection issues, data loss, server problems or security breaches. They generally involve some human error, so they could be classed as man-made, meaning that there is an 'identifiable cause'.
Disaster recovery testing is designed to help a business stay ahead of problems that could result in a loss of data in the future. According to the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, 93 percent of companies that lose access to their data for 10 days or more due to a disaster, file for bankruptcy within a year.
Depending on specific circumstances, here are some examples of how the above types of disasters could significantly derail business continuity. Later, we'll look at how disaster recovery planning and recovery testing can safeguard against such events, reduce recovery time in the future and help restore business continuity. Every business is different, however, and the disaster recovery plan that works for one organization may be entirely unsuitable for another.
One of the main goals of disaster recovery testing is to find out if a DR plan can work, and meet an organization's predetermined Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) requirements. Recovery testing also provides feedback to enterprises so they can amend their DR plan should any unexpected issues arise.in case of any unexpected issues
IT systems are rarely static in nature, so each time an organization adds a new element or installs an upgrade to the system, those additions need to be tested again. For example, storage systems and servers may have been added or upgraded, new applications deployed and older applications updated since an organization developed its original disaster recovery plan.
With more and more organizations migrating to the cloud, this is playing a larger role in an organization's IT infrastructure. A disaster recovery test helps to make sure a DR plan stays current in an IT world that changes constantly.
Disaster recovery testing, as we've already mentioned, is different for every business. However, there are some basic steps that need to be taken before the actual process of testing begins.
Before business continuity and normality can resume after a disaster, businesses need to know what 'normal' actually is. This involves identifying all the disparate assets that exist on the business network infrastructure. By creating an inventory of all of the IT resources on the network, and identifying what they contain, a business can start the process of consolidation, making it easier and more streamlined for the backup and recovery process in the future.
During the audit of assets, businesses may find that a great deal of data is actually redundant, or not necessary to keep the system running. Transferring every piece of unnecessary data in the network to a backup server could use a huge amount of processing power. Sorting redundant data can help reduce the size of a backup file, saving storage space and expense.
Every employee in an organization should have a role to play in an effective disaster recovery plan. While automated disaster recovery testing serves an important purpose in a DR plan, it only tests the technical components. If a real disaster occurs, it's the people within an organization who will need to know what to do to rapidly restore uptime.
When everyone knows what to do in response to an emergency, your DR plan will be more effective than it would be if nobody knew what to do when a disaster occurs.
Decide how quickly your organization needs to recover, and set your RTOs and RPOs. This could involve prioritizing which data needs to be accessed immediately, and which is less important. Data that doesn't require immediate access could be assigned a longer recover time and less frequent backups. While important data, like financials and compliance could be assigned more urgent RPOs and RTOs or even a backup server to take over for the main server in disaster recovery process.
Disasters like cyber attacks and ransomware attacks could destroy an organization's primary data storage solution, resulting in the permanent loss of that data. Cloud-based solutions can automatically download and copy data every few days (or even every few hours). Unlike older, manual backup methods requiring users to copy data to a disk or USB drive, backups via a cloud-based solution can be carried out at any time, and without having to access physical media.
Another example is if physical assets storing your data are damaged, by fire, flood, or human tampering, remote data backup can help minimize business disruptions.
Here, the DR plan owner and other members of the team behind its development and implementation closely review the plan, to find any inconsistencies or missing elements.
Much like a first rehearsal, stakeholders walk step by step through all the components of a disaster recovery plan. This helps determine if everyone knows what they are supposed to do in case of an emergency and uncovers any inconsistencies, missing information or errors.
Simulating disaster scenarios is a good way to see if the disaster recovery procedures and resources, including backup systems and recovery sites allocated for disaster recovery and business continuity work. A simulation involves running a variety of disaster scenarios to see if the teams involved in the DR process can restart technologies and business operations quickly and effectively. This process can determine if there is sufficient staff to get the DR plan executed properly.
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With your DR plan in place, and team members ready for any scenario, disaster recovery testing can go ahead. But a disaster recovery plan is only as good as its weakest link, so organizations should commit to regular disaster recovery testing. The frequency of testing depends on the business but this is another element of a DR plan that needs to be determined ahead of time.
Having third party monitoring tools in place can actually help to avoid certain disasters or at least reduce their severity. Monitoring can pick up anomalies within a system, and identify potential issues. IR's Collaborate suite of performance solutions provide the insights an organization needs to make proactive business decisions, formulate effective DR plans, and create an efficient production environment.