Your team has spent some time putting together a disaster recovery and data continuity plan. So how do you know if it actually works? Testing your plan disaster recovery plan is the next thing on your list.
Some questions you might be asking are:
- How do I test my disaster recovery plan?
- What does success or failure look like?
- What do we do if the plan fails?
To get started testing your plan requires getting everyone on board. There's a ton of moving parts. You've got to be able to cut a lot of people over to different things in a short order and make sure that they can work. You have to make sure that they can continue moving and depending on how large your organization is and what your resources are that could be several hours worth of work depending the scale of things.
Just getting the buy-in and making sure everyone's aware is critical. Sometimes it's difficult to get management to truly acknowledge something. Showing your leadership that your test is for preparedness as opposed to general productivity and that you'll be shutting things down for a couple hours to test a failover situation is never an easy thing to get scheduled.
You can test your disaster recovery plan after hours things with a limited amount of stuff. But really the only way to know if it's going to work for everybody and to make sure that everybody's comfortable with it is to run a fire drill during normal hours.