Companies must have a comprehensive and reliable disaster recovery (DR) strategy to protect their IT environments from natural and artificial disasters. However, developing a strategy and a DR plan is insufficient to guarantee success. It is essential for organizations to regularly test and update their DR plan to ensure it will work when a disaster strikes.
Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan for Testing
Organizations evaluate their ability to recover their IT systems in a disaster with DR tests. Recovery teams should use the test to examine specific aspects of the organization’s DR plan. Therefore, a DR plan is a prerequisite for performing a disaster recovery test.
Creating a disaster recovery plan involves the following steps.
- Inventory IT resources – Companies must identify all IT resources critical to business operations. The inventory must include on-premises and cloud systems and services. Teams must also identify network requirements and system dependencies. Recovery resources such as data backups and servers are an essential part of the IT inventory.
- Conduct a business impact analysis (BIA) – Company leadership uses the BIA to identify and prioritize the essential IT systems, applications, functions, and services that need to be recovered in a disaster to maintain business operations. The analysis should include the impacts of downtime. Teams can begin to determine the Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) for all critical systems.
- Perform a comprehensive risk assessment – The purpose of the risk assessment is to identify all potential threats that may cause disruptions to the IT environment. Risks are not limited to natural disasters such as hurricanes or floods. Companies must consider risks such as hardware failures, cyberattacks, and human error resulting in data loss or system outages. Teams should strive to identify infrastructure, personnel, and process vulnerabilities that may affect business operations.
- Define the disaster recovery objectives – Decision-makers need to set disaster recovery objectives for each system or application included in the DR plan. Two key metrics need to be defined for all elements in the recovery plan.
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – The RPO establishes the maximum data loss the company can tolerate. Data loss is measured in time and needs to align with backup procedures. For example, a one-hour RPO indicates that backups need to be taken hourly to meet the RPO.
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – The RTO defines the downtime the business can tolerate before recovering essential systems. Teams must perform recovery procedures within this time frame or risk damage to the business.
- Create recovery strategies and procedures – Organizations must develop recovery strategies for each critical system and service. The strategies include backup procedures, failover, and failback plans. The company must select an on-premises or cloud recovery site.
- Define recovery roles and a communication plan – All recovery team members need to be identified. Leaders must define roles so everyone knows what to do during a disaster. A communication plan keeps recovery teams, business leaders, and other stakeholders apprised of recovery activities.
These steps provide a reliable DR plan to recover the IT environment in a disaster.
Types of Disaster Recovery Tests
Teams utilize disaster recovery tests to evaluate their recovery plan and ensure it can quickly restore critical systems and data resources when needed. Different types of tests have varying purposes and focus on diverse aspects of the DR plan.
- Tabletop test – Team members review the DR plan and discuss the actions they must take in a disaster. Recovery procedures are not physically tested, but stakeholders can identify vulnerabilities in the DR plan that may need to be updated.
- Simulation test – The recovery team reacts to a simulated disaster scenario in real time. Typically, recovery is not performed on live systems. This type of test may be called a walkthrough, where team members review all recovery activities step-by-step.
- Parallel test – This test is designed to evaluate the recovery site. Secondary systems are recovered and run in parallel with production systems to eliminate business impacts.
- Failover test – Companies test their automatic failover procedures to ensure they can take over from primary systems in a disaster. Failover tests are vital when continuous service is required in an outage.
- RPO and RTO tests – Organizations must test recovery procedures against their defined RPOs and RTOs. Ideally, the recovery team can meet all metrics. In some cases, companies may have to modify recovery objectives based on process limitations discovered during this testing.
- Full disaster test – Teams execute the complete DR plan in this type of test. IT systems are switched to the secondary site. Business operations utilize the recovered systems to ensure a successful recovery. Further testing is done when switching back to the primary environment.
Organizations should utilize various tests to validate recovery procedures. Teams can perform simulation and parallel tests without impacting business operations. Over time, recovery processes can be refined and optimized.
When Should You Test Your DR Plan?
Best practices indicate an organization should conduct regularly scheduled DR tests. At a minimum, companies should perform an annual test of the complete plan. This test ensures that the procedures will recover the environment effectively. Teams must modify and update the procedures to address issues encountered in the recovery, including the inability to meet the defined RPOs and RTOs.
A company or individual recovery team should also test and update its DR plan based on the following criteria.
- The plan and procedures must be updated and tested when new infrastructure components are added to the recovery or the IT environment has changed. Steps may need to be removed to address systems no longer required for recovery.
- Tests should be performed when new personnel assume roles in the recovery process. Recovery teams need to ensure all members understand their responsibilities.
- Testing is essential when elements of the plan have been modified. For instance, if cloud backups have replaced an on-premises solution, testing will verify the recovery procedures still work.
VAST’s Streamlined Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)
VAST’s DRaaS offering leverages the power of ASW Elastic Disaster Recovery. It provides companies of any size with a scalable and cost-effective disaster recovery solution. DRaaS enables recovery of on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. The ability to recover to alternate AWS regions adds resilience in the face of extensive disasters.
DRaaS also furnishes a unified testing platform so teams can test recovery and failover procedures to ensure they work in a disaster. Contact VAST today and start protecting your IT environment with an effective DRaaS solution.
