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To ensure the efficacy of any plan, you need to put it into practice. When you ‘practice how you play’ with disaster recovery plans, you identify potential issues so you can course correct before you need to recover from a live recovery event.
This article overviews examples of disaster recovery (IT DR) scenarios, how to effectively run IT disaster recovery exercise scenarios, and IT disaster recovery planning software to help you automate and execute recoveries and testing scenarios.
Understanding IT disaster recovery exercises: The fundamentals
A disaster recovery exercise involves testing all processes in a disaster recovery plan, including provisioning the recovery infrastructure and application, the failover, failback, communication, and roles and responsibilities of teams.
Planning your IT disaster recovery exercises
There are various disaster recovery exercise scenarios but the most commonly tested exercises include: plan review, tabletop test, and simulation. This includes the technical and operational aspects of the disaster recovery (DR) plan, completing all tasks in the recovery runbooks, measuring recovery time actuals (RTAs), and more.
Steps for planning disaster recovery exercises
It’s critical to assess your business’ specific needs and risks and incorporate your IT DR exercises in your overall plan. If your business is subject to stringent regulations, like DORA law, you need to make sure your disaster recovery exercises follow the DORA framework including recovery and vulnerability tests at least once per year and threat-led penetration testing every three years.
Key considerations for disaster recovery exercise scenarios
Disaster recovery exercises should be front and center when creating your IT DR plans. For example, disaster recovery tests should be executed from a recovery platform that enables you to:
- Track all recovery tasks
- Capture RTAs vs. recovery time objectives
- Pinpoint weaknesses and risks
- Identify potential areas for improvement
- Decrease downtime
It’s important to consider your business’ unique needs and consider any risks, particularly regulatory risks when planning disaster recovery exercises.
Examples of effective disaster recovery exercises and scenarios
There are various scenarios, but the most common IT disaster recovery exercises are plan review, tabletop test, and simulation. Let’s review the three disaster recovery exercises in more detail with some examples.
Example #1: IT Disaster recovery plan review
A disaster recovery plan review is often a first step businesses take when testing their plans. During the review, DR managers conduct a thorough assessment of the entire plan including each step. This helps to ensure that there aren’t any missing components, teams, or responsibilities. It gives businesses the ability to ensure the completeness of the plan so they are ready to respond to and recover from a potential disaster.
Example #2: Disaster recovery tabletop exercise
During a disaster recovery tabletop exercise procedure, all DR team members participate in a discussion to validate the contents of the DR plan, and confirm their roles, responsibilities, and responses during a recovery. To be effective, the tabletop exercise needs clear objectives and scope, follow a schedule, and review the process once completed.
How is a tabletop exercise different from a plan review? During a tabletop exercise, the group actually performs, in real time, the actions they would take when a disaster scenario takes place, but in a highly controlled test environment. For example, the following types of questions should be answered and practiced during a tabletop exercise:
- Are there communications to external parties: customers, press, etc.?
- Did your command and control systems work seamlessly?
- Did you fail back to the primary location or will operations continue from the recovery location?
- Did you have to tap into your contingency plan?
Example #3: Disaster recovery simulation
A disaster recovery simulation is one of the most effective and advanced disaster recovery testing methods as it closely mirrors a real scenario in a near-live setting. This provides the most accurate testing and measurement of resilience.
DR simulations get you one step closer to determining if your DRP will work in a real disaster event. It will expose any data recovery issues and provide RTAs not just estimates. Imagine understanding that a failback method doesn’t actually work prior to needing it during a power outage. DR simulations provide the most accurate type of test results with valuable insight into the true effectiveness of your plan.
Conducting and evaluating disaster recovery exercises
Guidelines for executing disaster recovery exercises effectively
Regardless of the disaster recovery exercise type, it’s important to make sure all teams are aligned All participants should:
- Have access to the relevant DR plans
- Understand roles, responsibilities and escalation methods
- Know all assigned and upcoming tasks including timings and dependencies
- Update tasks in the DR plan
- Communicate across the appropriate channels and in the required timeframes
IT disaster recovery exercises with automated runbooks
Automated runbooks can help ensure your IT disaster recovery scenarios are more efficiently executed.
Benefits of using automated runbooks for disaster recovery exercises
Automated runbooks provide a comprehensive, step-by-step guide and outline the tasks and dependencies in a disaster recovery drill, in chronological order, for easier management. To standardize DR plans for scenarios or live recoveries, use automated runbooks to create IT disaster recovery plan templates.
Execute efficient IT disaster recovery exercises with Cutover
Cutover’s SaaS platform provides a central location for all team members to access and execute the DR plan. Unlike a static document, Cutover’s automated runbooks provide a dynamic format to efficiently conduct disaster recoveries and test scenarios.
Real-time monitoring of IT disaster recovery exercises
Whether during a DR exercise or live recovery, it’s critical to have real-time visibility of progress. Cutover’s live dashboards provide real-time recovery data so you can track the status of the DR scenario, identify areas that require attention, and make improvements.
Dashboards provide a mechanism to keep DR managers and team members informed on execution status. The dashboards are easily shared with key stakeholders or external team members so they are aligned on the progress of the DR scenario.
Ensure regulatory compliance with audit trails
Regulated industries, like financial institutions, need to provide proof of disaster recovery test results to ensure they meet compliance. Cutover’s automated runbooks include an immutable audit log that automatically tracks the timings of each task in a runbook including who did what and when. This provides the level of detail needed to satisfy regulatory requirements.
Improve future IT DR drills with accurate reporting
The most important part of any disaster recovery exercise is to compile lessons learned and then update your DR plan. This ensures that the disaster recovery exercise is updated and improved upon.
Cutover’s reports and analytics provide visibility into how your disaster recovery drill (or live recovery) performed. You can then evaluate if objectives were met, how effectively the DR scenario was executed and if potential improvements or updates are needed.
Ready to learn more? Book a demo and learn how Cutover’s SaaS platform and automated runbooks can help you execute efficient live IT disaster recoveries and test scenarios.