You’ve got this really well-thought-out data recovery plan.
It’s got every detail you and the disaster recovery team can think of, it covers every contingency, explains each step in gross detail, and – for all intents and purposes – it’s near perfect.
But how do you know?
Even if you’ve read, re-read, and even re-re-read it to be certain it’s an exhaustive document, and have reviewed it with the rest of the disaster recovery team in a similar repeated fashion, all coming to the conclusion that the the disaster recovery (DR) plan you have in place has what it takes to protect the organization, the question to be answered is still, “How do you know?”
Without running a disaster recovery test plan with some form of recovery simulation, you don’t. Simulations are the only real method of data disaster recovery testing to know whether what’s been planned will work or not.
There are three reasons why you should consider a data recovery simulation as the method used for your disaster recovery (DR) testing:
- Simulations Expose Real Data Recovery Problems – You’d obviously rather know about problems with your recovery plan well before you actually need to use them in production. Security settings, application incompatibilities, etc. all can be the source of recovery failure, and running a recovery simulation will expose these issues. This allows you to document workarounds, configuration changes, and additional steps needed to successfully recover during a disaster.
- Simulations Depict Actual Timeframes – Established data recovery objectives are just like an airplane design that is supposed to go Mach 2. They’re just “really great ideas” until put to the test. That’s not to say that recovery objectives aren’t valuable – it’s just that their value is proven when tested. Running a DR test simulation allows you to see how well your DR team performs, whether expectations put on your backup infrastructure and recovery environment are realistic, and just how long this thing is really going to take.
- Simulations Identify Where Internal IT is Lacking – Your IT staff is the de facto experts on the systems and applications you run on a daily basis. In many cases, even expertise on the recovery of a given workload may be within the realm of some members of your IT staff. But a recovery test simulating not just the restoring of a backup, but the actual recovery of some part of operations may show you where your IT team is not entirely ready and needs help from a partner that specializes in disaster recovery.
Data Recovery Simulations are the only means of Disaster Recovery testing that provide the feedback necessary to decide whether to celebrate or go back to the drawing board. By performing a data recovery simulation, you’ll experience the good and bad of your DR plan, and be able to make needed changes before the plan is really needed.
