Disaster Recovery - what should you be testing?
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By: Beth Baxter, Manager, Plan B Disaster Recovery LtdPosted: 5th November 2014Copyright Plan B Disaster Recovery Ltd © 2014
If one of your responsibilities is to minimise the risk of IT downtime to your business, you'll likely have a strong business continuity plan and disaster recovery solution in place. Research carried out by the likes of Forrester certainly proves that more budget is going into business continuity than ever. Whether you manage your disaster recovery in-house or outsource it, one of the fundamental ways you can improve your resilience is by testing your disaster recovery solution more regularly. This is because recovery is more likely to fail if the solution is not been tested regularly.
Regular changes to IT infrastructure means that errors occur with every recovery when it has not been tested following such changes. Add to this the challenge of reconfiguring your entire system to work on a new platform and it's not surprising that 19% of recoveries fail. So in order to give yoursef the best chance of recovery, and to miniise the effect on your business of an IT disaster, you need to test. And test regularly. Here is a guide to the types of tests carried out by some of the mainstream disaster recovery solutions. It stands to reason that the more tests you carry out, the less likely your recovery is to fail.
Type of Test
Tape Backup
Online/DiscBackup
VM Replication
Warm Standby– DR Site
Pre-Recovery
Data Corruption
Annual DR Test
Daily
Is Replicated
Daily
Daily
System Image Complete
Annual DR Test
Daily
Daily
Daily
Daily
DR Platform Operational
Annual DR Test
Periodically
Daily
Network Config Correct
Annual DR Test
Annual DR Test
Daily
DNS Functioning
Annual DR Test
Annual DR Test
Daily
DB Services started and mounted
Annual DR Test
Annual DR Test
Daily
Application Services Started
Annual DR Test
Annual DR Test
Daily
Web Interfaces Correctly Displayed
Annual DR Test
Annual DR Test
Daily
No Unknown Errors in Event Log
Annual DR Test
Annual DR Test
Daily
If you're managing your disaster recovery in-house then it's within your power to run all these tests. The main limiting factor is time, and because disaster recovery doesn't give you a competitive advantage on a daily basis, many companies prioritise new technology over resilience. This is why outsourcing your DR is often beneficial—leaving the IT team to work on improving competitive advantage and leaving the experts to maintain your availability.
If you alreay outsource, then it's worth talking to your provider to see what they're testing and how often. Testing isn't just testing—this could save or destroy your business.
