Testing a Disaster Recovery Plan

Disaster can strike at any moment within your business, which is why you should have a good disaster recovery plan in place. Without a good plan in place, then it is fair to say that your staff will be running around, wondering what to do next. That is not a situation you want to find yourself in. You want business to continue as usual while your company figures out how to figure out a particular disaster. Whether that is data center failure or a natural disaster, you have to have a plan in place so that you don't lose your customers. You would be surprised at how much money a company can lose in just a matter of days from when a disaster strikes.

When you have a disaster recovery plan in place, you are doing what is necessary to make sure that your business can serve customers to the best of its ability. Even if it cannot service all, serving some can make an incredible difference. A company that does not have a disaster recovery plan in place is a company that can go out of business in a heartbeat. This is because their customers were not aware of the situation and thought the company was giving them bad service.

Types of testing

There are several different types of testing that you can use when testing a disaster recovery plan. You can do walkthrough testing, simulation testing, checklist testing, full interruption testing, and parallel testing.

Many companies decide to go ahead with a checklist to then proceed to a simulation test. The simulation test is important so that employees know what to do when a disaster actually occurs. The company may decide to do a full interruption test while doing a simulation test, but that really depends on if the company has the type of budget that will allow for this type of testing.

Testing your plan

There are many different disasters that can take place. You may have a fire in the building, you may have some sort of natural disaster such as an earthquake, or your entire data center can fail. Although data centers are very reliable and it is rare that they fail, it does tend to be the most common failure. Suddenly, employees are unable to retrieve customer information. That is why you need to check the following with your disaster recovery plan:

- The feasibility of your recovery plan
- Making sure that backup facilities are feasible
- Ensure the adequacy of the procedures and make sure teams are working on their part
- Ensure the training of team managers
- Providing all employees with the means to maintain and update the recovery plan
- Making sure an acceptable amount of time to recover has been established
- Ensure that every location within the company is prepared
- Verify the cost to perform the test to ensure that the budget is adhered to

From there, you need the entire staff to go into "pretend" mode and simulate that a disaster is really occurring. For example, the data center failure recovery plan may be the first one that you want to test. Now, if you are on a strict budget when conducting your test, you may have to work on testing multiple scenarios at once so that all you have to do is one test. You may require two if you have a lot of issues that need fixed. Once they are fixed, it is very important to test them to make sure they will work. Once you have determined that you have a solid plan, you can be rest assured that you'll be in good shape when a disaster actually occurs.

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