Disaster Recovery Plan Testing 101
You’ve written your disaster plan and distributed it to your staff. You’ve included all the points required for a decent plan: assigning a disaster recovery team and coordinator, creating detailed recovery procedures and instructions and call trees with employees and vendors. You’ve covered hot topics such as pandemic planning and long term back-up power. Now you sit back and wait for a disaster to show how ready your systems are for it, right?
Not so fast. True, you’ve done the hardest part, which is getting your plan ready. But how ready is it? One way to know is to put it through its paces and test it before it’s really needed.
But it’s not enough to test your backup tapes once in a while or cycle your generator once a year. Testing your disaster plan thoroughly involves testing all systems, people, and processes for their readiness and resiliency to help you see the gaps in your plan (and every plan has gaps). Testing also verifies that the information in your plan is correct, and it lets you improve your plan over time so that it’s a living document, not a dusty binder on a shelf.
See Disaster Recovery Plan Testing 101: Don’t let a disaster be your first test of your recovery plan, by Tony Howlett for Windows IT Pro.
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An unexercised contingency plan could be worse than no plan at all!
Be sure to read Disaster Recovery Testing: Exercising Your Contingency Plan, Philip Jan Rothstein, FBCI, Editor – the only book on this subject – for valuable tips, techniques and insights. And no, this book doesn’t mention Zombies – or Tribbles. Maybe the next edition…
Tags: exercise, test, walkthrough
