Plan Testing & Continuous Improvement is performed on a periodic basis to validate the feasibility of Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) Plans and to identify areas of improvement.

The objectives are:

  • Coordinate with functional business owners and other stakeholders to schedule and develop the scope and objectives of DR and BC tests
  • Provide leadership, oversight, and assist functional business owners in the execution of DR and BC tests
  • Collect and review results of the DR and BC tests with functional business owners to determine if objectives of the test were achieved
  • Coordinate with functional business owners and other stakeholders to conduct a postmortem review session of the test to identify and discuss lessons learned and opportunities to make updates to the DR and BC Plans
  • Coordinate the implementation of improvements to DR and BC plans

Benefits:

  • Mitigates business risks and financial exposures
  • Provides compliance benefits
  • Validates the feasibility of DR and BC Plans and identifies opportunities for improvement
  • Improves the quality of DR and BC Plans
  • Builds confidence within the organization
  • Establishes and enhances awareness as well as preparedness

Frequently Asked Questions

One of the most important elements of a DR plan is a test schedule. Without a test regiment, the exponential speed of change can put you out of business when a DR event occurs.  

Consider a recent situation with a new client. They had 100+ servers on site, backed up to tape. They had a legacy DR plan. Recently they had a flood which didn't affect their network but did motivate them to test restoring from tape. Needless to say, it was a failure. Studies indicate that recovery from tape fails 80% of the time. The solution was to move to a Scarlett Solution and Datto. Datto offers a hybrid cloud solution with triple redundancy, local and cloud. Now they have peace of mind and testing is stress free.  

Annually at a minimum but it is recommended quarterly.