When an IT outage occurs, you don’t want to doubt the effectiveness of your IT disaster recovery plan. The only way to ensure it will work is to audit the plan regularly.
This article overviews what a disaster recovery plan audit is, how to prepare for it, and the importance of a disaster recovery test report.
What is a disaster recovery plan audit?
IT disaster recovery plans (DRPs) provide a comprehensive course of action for a business to recover important business services during an outage or IT disaster. Once you’ve created the disaster recovery plan, you need to regularly review, test, and audit it for efficacy.
An essential part of the process, a disaster recovery plan audit evaluates all parts of the DRP to identify any gaps or potential areas for improvement. This includes the people involved, the recovery process, and the technology used during the recovery.
Preparing for an IT disaster recovery audit: A checklist
Preparedness is key! Similar to a disaster recovery plan checklist, before you start your disaster recovery plan testing scenario, here are a few key considerations:
Manage vendor contracts
Review any affiliated or impacted third-party software or information communication technologies (ICT) to ensure responsibilities are clearly defined. Assess critical disaster recovery capabilities and ensure the disaster recovery plans of critical vendors are well defined and understood.
Review IT application tiers
Validate that your application tiering is still accurate and disaster recovery plans are organized by tiers. Account for all interdependencies and integrations that can impact the timing of when applications need to be recovered.
Gain alignment on goals and objectives
Before executing your IT disaster recovery plan audit make sure you’ve outlined goals and objectives that align with both the overall business and departmental objectives.
Consider regulatory requirements
Does this disaster recovery test or audit fulfill a regulatory requirement? If so, does it require a specific timeframe, testing type, recovery time, or reporting format? Making sure you understand up front what is needed, in detail, will save you time in the future.
Communicate the DRP audit to all stakeholders and participants
Make sure that teams are aligned and understand the goal at the outset to avoid confusion.
Collect evidence through automated runbooks
To effectively execute a disaster recovery plan audit, use automated runbooks. Runbooks enable orchestration across all manual and automated tasks and includes an audit log that automatically captures all tasks with timings of who did what and when.
Take post-audit actions
Develop an action plan to address audit findings and recommendations and implement corrective measures to improve disaster recovery capabilities. Then, monitor progress and measure effectiveness of improvements via future tests.
Key audit procedures in disaster recovery planning
Once you are prepared for the disaster recovery audit, you’ll want to make sure the audit is comprehensive so you don’t miss any key areas. Here’s a list of key IT disaster recovery audit procedures:
- Define the objective of the audit
- Review the existing IT disaster recovery plan
- Interview, or survey, application owners and key stakeholders
- Run a disaster recovery exercise, test, or simulation
- Analyze exercise results and identify gaps or improvement areas
- Share report findings with key stakeholders and regulators, as appropriate
- Update the IT disaster recovery plan to address areas of concerns
When to perform an IT disaster recovery audit
Each business will have different business needs and regulatory requirements that help determine the right frequency of disaster recovery audits. A good rule of thumb is to perform an audit after every disaster recovery exercise or test. Additionally, if your enterprise must comply with IT disaster recovery regulations, you will need to provide proof of disaster recovery tests at least once per year.
Auditing IT disaster recovery test results
When auditing IT disaster recovery test results, you’ll want to understand the results holistically and have a detailed view. Overall, did the test meet the overall objectives and required recovery times? Two key metrics to analyze are the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).
RTO measures how quickly the application must be back up and available after an outage, while RPO measures the maximum amount of data your application can tolerate. During your analysis, if the disaster recovery audit shows that you exceed either RTO or RPO, you need to reexamine the overall recovery strategy and plan and make significant improvements.
Additionally, you’ll want to audit and analyze results at a more granular level - reviewing each recovery task. Identify which tasks were executed early, on time, behind schedule, or missed completely. This helps pinpoint specific points of failure in the process, which could be detrimental during an actual live recovery.
Auditing the communication plan during the disaster recovery test is also important to ensure there are no breakdowns. It’s helpful to understand:
- Did all recovery teams understand how the disaster recovery test was progressing in real time?
- How were task owners (individuals or teams) alerted of task updates?
- Was there an escalation plan and was it followed?
- Were there any siloes or breakdowns?
- How were executives and key stakeholders notified of the progress or escalations?
Overall, an effective disaster recovery test report can provide various views of results so you can audit the data effectively.
Reporting and follow-up audit results
A disaster recovery test report provides a mechanism to capture the test findings and can act as proof for regulators. You’ll want to share the test report with various team members providing them the appropriate level of detail.
For example, a disaster recovery team member will want to understand which tasks fell behind to isolate the improvement areas. However, an executive will want a high-level overview of the recovery test and understand the total length of time and if RTOs and RPOs were met. And, regulators require a disaster recovery test audit report to verify an organization's ability to protect critical data, maintain operations during disruptions, and comply with relevant regulations.
Disaster recovery test audit report with Cutover
Using Cutover’s IT disaster recovery planning software and automated runbooks, you can host and execute your disaster recovery plans and then easily run, track and report on DRP audits. After a test scenario is complete, Cutover provides a standard dashboard and disaster recovery test audit report showing a chronological order of all the tasks executed and their timings from the results.
Ready to learn more? Schedule a demo today or visit www.cutover.com.