IT disasters are catastrophically common in today’s business environment. Disaster recovery (DR) scenarios to test such as power outages, disruptions caused by human error, and data breaches due to cyber attacks can all create significant challenges for companies that make it difficult to conduct normal operations.
Investing in proper IT disaster recovery testing, and using the right IT disaster recovery software, enables you to develop your technology’s resilience and ensure you’re able to recover platforms, databases, and networks in the aftermath of an IT disaster.
What is IT disaster recovery testing?
Before defining IT disaster recovery testing, it’s important first to understand IT disaster recovery planning. An IT disaster recovery plan includes the roles, responsibilities, processes, and policies an organization has in place to ensure its systems and applications can quickly recover from IT disaster recovery scenarios such as application and hardware failures, network outages, or cyber attacks.
IT disaster recovery plans ensure businesses are able to restore lost data, applications, and systems during an unexpected emergency, such as a faulty configuration setting or cybersecurity breach, and continue delivering value to customers with as little disruption as possible.
IT disaster recovery testing, on the other hand, is the rehearsal of those disaster recovery plans in live settings. As part of their testing procedures, organizations simulate a technology disaster incident in order to measure the recovery time actuals (RTAs) against their defined recovery time objectives (RTOs) in stress-tested environments. Testing gives organizations important insight into their ability to respond to an IT disaster incident, providing feedback they can use to enhance their recovery plans and better respond to specific IT disaster scenarios.
Types of effective IT disaster recovery testing in action
There are three different types of IT disaster recovery tests commonly in use today:
- Plan review: IT disaster recovery managers assess their entire plan step by step to ensure each phase adequately prepares the organization to respond to an application outage. Plan reviews are not conducted in simulated IT disaster settings. Instead, they give managers an opportunity to determine if there are components or responsibilities missing that need to be addressed.
- Tabletop test: This type of IT disaster recovery exercise helps stakeholders work through their plans in a highly controlled testing environment. Each step, process, and responsibility is carefully presented and analyzed to ensure every individual knows what steps are required and where they fit in the larger recovery plan.
- Simulation: The most effective type of IT disaster recovery testing, simulating an application outage scenario lets you test your IT disaster recovery plans in a near-live setting, giving you the most accurate feedback on the effectiveness of your recovery process. Simulations let you move beyond desktop disaster recovery planning, building muscle memory within the organizations and determining whether planned concepts work in an actual disaster.
The importance of IT disaster recovery testing
IT disaster recovery testing is an essential business function for today’s organizations. It ensures you’re able to protect yourself from the most serious IT risks facing your business while ensuring staff are ready to respond in case a real disaster happens.
The benefits of effective IT disaster recovery testing include:
- Mitigating damage: IT disasters are unexpected and can cause severe damage to your entire organization. IT disaster recovery testing ensures you are prepared to reduce system downtime and minimize the impact on your business when an actual disaster occurs.
- Avoiding non-compliance fees: Certain IT disasters (like data breaches) could subject organizations to costly lawsuits, steep data privacy noncompliance fees, and regulatory fines. Disaster recovery planning and testing improve compliance by satisfying regulatory requirements, building trust in the organization’s ability to handle disasters.
- Reducing risk exposure: Depending on the nature of their business and areas of operation, every organization has a different risk profile. It’s important that organizations test IT disaster recovery scenarios that are relevant to the risks they face as a business, helping them devise recovery strategies that are best equipped to help them manage and overcome a crisis.
Common IT disaster recovery testing scenarios
Consider the following IT disaster recovery testing scenarios, depending on the needs of your business operation:
1. Ransomware
Cyber attacks such as ransomware attacks are on the rise. As businesses increasingly migrate their applications, workflows, and sensitive company data to the cloud and other digital environments, they expose themselves to cyber criminals who are adept at penetrating those networks and exfiltrating data.
Ransomware attacks can cause companies to lose sensitive consumer and enterprise data, access to critical business accounts, and the ability to transmit data within internal systems. In addition to seriously limiting a business’s capacity to complete normal functions, this could also damage its reputation and erode consumer trust in its information security and recovery mechanisms.
2. Power outages
Power outages can cause significant operational downtime, data loss, and financial impacts, especially if recovery plans are not fully tested to ensure their reliability. By conducting regular disaster recovery tests, organizations can identify vulnerabilities in their infrastructure, refine their response strategies, and validate the effectiveness of backup systems. These tests also help ensure that staff are trained and ready to execute recovery plans efficiently, minimizing downtime and preserving the integrity of vital data and operations.
3. Human error
Human error is a leading cause of IT disasters, often resulting from mistakes made during routine operations, configuration changes, or system maintenance. These errors can range from accidental data deletion, misconfigurations, or improper implementation of updates, leading to significant disruptions, data breaches, or system failures. Unlike technical faults, human errors are unpredictable and can occur despite advanced systems and automated processes. The impact of such mistakes can be severe, causing extended downtime, loss of critical data, and compromised security. To mitigate these risks, it’s crucial for organizations to implement and test thorough IT disaster recovery plans to quickly recover if an error occurs.
4. Software and/or hardware failures
Hardware failures, such as server crashes, hard drive malfunctions, or network equipment breakdowns, can lead to data loss and significant downtime. Similarly, software failures, including bugs, crashes, or corruption of critical applications, can halt productivity and disrupt services. To effectively manage these risks, organizations must have robust, well tested disaster recovery plans in place.
Testing your IT disaster recovery plan
Effective IT disaster recovery planning requires routine disaster recovery software testing to ensure plans proceed as expected in live settings. Testing enables you to examine the effectiveness of your plans while also identifying possible shortcomings that can be addressed to achieve your recovery time objective.
As part of your testing initiatives, you should also stay abreast of the latest changes to all relevant regulatory standards. Compliance regulations are routinely updated to address shifts in the threat landscape, and failing to account for those could expose your organization to preventable risk and cause you to pay steep penalty fees.
While most organizations consider IT disaster recovery testing important, many give their employees notice before initiating a test. At Cutover, we provide organizations with the tools to conduct unannounced IT DR testing to more closely mimic an actual disaster, giving you the confidence that your disaster recovery procedures and processes will work as planned.
Our technology enables you to bridge the gap between people and technology to help you run a more complex disaster recovery test across your entire organization. Reach out to our team to learn more.
Planning and executing your IT disaster recovery plan
When it comes time to plan and execute your IT disaster recovery plan, follow these IT disaster recovery plan steps:
- Take stock of your infrastructure and applications and assess what level of criticality each piece of technology is. This will help you prioritize which to recover first and set recovery time objectives.
- Outline the steps of your plan. Find out more about how to write an IT disaster recovery plan.
- Thoroughly review and test your plan to ensure it will work in a real-world scenario.
Use an automated disaster recovery solution like Cutover to codify, improve, automate, execute and audit your plans to ensure maximum efficiency and confidence.