Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery Plan – Testing Guidelines

In order to ensure the effectiveness of your Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan, it must be tested regularly. This ensures the viability of the plan and guarantees that staff are fully acquainted with its procedures.

Frequency of Testing

It can be difficult to determine how often you should test your Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Plan. This should be contingent on the potential change to staff, business systems, location, services, or any contractual or legislative issues. The company should test the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan whenever major changes have been made to the content or to the company’s business operations. At the very least, it should be tested yearly.

Testing of the Plan

Before you test the Disaster Recovery plan you should develop a step by step guide to do so. This should outline the main activities of the test such as start and stop time, objectives, co-ordination, documentation and results.

Resources should be allocated to the test. These resources should ideally be the people that would normally handle a live Disaster situation. There should also be ‘stand-in’ personnel available and fully trained in case key personnel are unavailable in a live Disaster Recovery situation.

Documentation

The test should follow the procedures set out by the most up to date Disaster Recovery plan. There should be copies of this plan stored in remote locations from the main business e.g. home of Managing Director. Every time the Disaster Recovery plan is tested the documentation should be updated with the results.

Results

The results should be fully analysed and documented. If a problem arose, then it should be documented and resolved. Learn from your mistakes!

Finally, results of the test should be communicated to the entire company along with a copy of the updated Disaster Recovery plan.