Disaster Recovery Planning

Disaster Recovery Business Continuity for Remote Offices

webmaster — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:57:32 -0600

Data residing outside the data center at remote and branch offices (ROBOs) accounts for a significant portion of an enterprise's information store, yet it often either is protected with inefficient backup processes or is not protected at all -- leaving companies at risk on many fronts.

In a recent research report, high priority projects for ROBOs included improving information security measures; ensuring compliance with government, industry or corporate governance mandates; and improving Disaster Recovery Business Continuity processes.

DRP and Security Plans key to compliance

webmaster — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:32:09 -0600

Preparing for a disaster requires detailed planning, preparation and testing. Knowing what IT assets need to be recovered, where to recover them and how to recover them are the essence of IT Disaster Recovery. The most difficult challenge is mapping the prioritized business requirements to the IT assets so that recovery can be staged. The recovery strategy then evolves based on the available options which support the required recovery objectives. The resulting Disaster Recovery plans contain all of the information detailing where to go, who is to do what and the information required to rebuild servers, restore applications and data as well as restart and synchronization procedures.

DRP Template

webmaster — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 08:54:29 -0600

If you are new to recovery planning, make sure that you research the subject thoroughly before embarking on a disaster recovery project. Consider engaging a consultant (internal or external to your organization) to help you in your project planning effort. Disaster recovery planning is not a two-month project, neither is it a project that once completed, you can forget about. An effective recovery plan is a live recovery plan. The plan must be maintained current and tested/exercised regularly.

The primary objective of a Business Resumption Plan is to enable an organization to survive a disaster and to reestablish normal business operations. In order to survive, the organization must assure that critical operations can resume normal processing within a reasonable time frame. Therefore, the goals of the Business Resumption Plan should be to:

Identify weaknesses and implement a disaster prevention program;
minimize the duration of a serious disruption to business operations;
facilitate effective co-ordination of recovery tasks; and
reduce the complexity of the recovery effort.

Why is diaster and business continuity planning important

webmaster — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 12:35:20 -0600

Federal, State and Local Governments are chartered to mitigate and control the event, provide life and safety measures, and then restore infrastructures. The Red Cross provides emergency relief in the form of food, health and shelter. If insured, an insurance company will settle damage claims and provide monetary relief. However, none of these organizations will, or can, recover your business. Your companys recovery is strictly up to you, and it commences with a solid business continuity/disaster recovery plan.

Should your company experience a disaster, the first 72 hours following the incident will be the most critical in your recovery efforts. How you respond during that period will determine if your business will survive or not. Furthermore, the most important hour is the one immediately following the event. If ever required, your Business continuity plan will enable you to respond in a systematic and organized fashion. It will guide your organization, step-by-step, from responding to the actual event all the way through to full occupancy of your repaired facility.

Simple Disaster Planning Activities

webmaster — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 13:43:38 -0600

Creating a disaster recovery plan is a complex task; however there are a number of basic steps that you can follow to start thre process

Prepare your systems, processes, and people for an organized response to disaster when it strikes.
Identify critical IT systems and develop a long-range strategy.
Select and train your disaster recovery team.
Conduct a Business Impact Analysis.
Determine risks to your business from natural or human-made causes.
Get management support.
Create appropriate plan documents.
Test your plan.

Disaster Plan & Business Continuity Infrastructure

webmaster — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 01:31:40 -0600

The key technology elements of a Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Plan (DRP/BCP) infrastructure are the primary data center, a remote site that duplicates the resources in that primary location and the method used to get files (master and transaction) between the two sites - such as high-bandwidth network connections. The best DRP/BCP strategies follow a "redundant every-thing" philosophy throughout the data center. Multiple mainframes and servers should run in the production and backup data facilities. Then, if a component in the production system encounters problems, it immediately fails over to the local backup as a first line of defense.

Power supplies and communication links are one of the most critical components in a DRP/BCP strategy.

White House email system down for a day

webmaster — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:53:38 -0600

High tech White House falls down when its email disaster plan does not work.

The White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs announced at a 1:45 p.m. press briefing that he was unable to send out the customary week-ahead memo as the White House e-mail system was "not working so well." D.C. reporters got their next e-mail from the White House around 8:30 the following morning indicating that the outage lasted most of a day.

How to calculate the cost of downtime

webmaster — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:32:53 -0600

One overlooked truth is that downtime costs accelerate in a non-linear fashion every hour. If a system fails for five minutes, the costs are fairly low because manual methods (paper and pencil) of making records or communicating by telephone instead of e-mails can suffice to conduct business. Over an extended period, however, the volume of work overwhelms the manual processes. Yet some businesses - such as Amazon or e-Bay - cannot run at all on manual processes. Business and financial operations increasingly deteriorate, and the rate of dollar losses grows - sometimes to the point of fatally damaging the business.

In addition, when assessing the financial impact of downtime, you need to consider factors such as potential lost revenue, reductions in worker productivity, and damaged market reputation. In some cases, downtime can even reduce shareholder confidence, which can create unnecessary and unplanned costs. Financial analysts and accountants at your company can help you come up with the factors at your company that are affected by downtime and contribute to its costs.

Disaster Planning Considerations

webmaster — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:34:32 -0600

Many enterprises have taken a segmented approach to Business Continuity and Availability, adding point technology and reactive services to address disaster recovery. This approach can be very complex, time-consuming and costly. The task becomes much easier when a single vendor takes responsibility for architecting, implementing, testing and supporting the solution.

There is an increase in the number of companies and organizations requiring 24 x 365 days of IT uptime. In fact, ESG research indicates that 36% of enterprises indicate they will incur significant revenue loss or other adverse business impact if they have even an hour or less of downtime on their mission-critical applications. Almost 15% indicate they cannot tolerate any downtime.1 In the past, this type of business demand was only consigned to a relatively small group. However, many more organizations of all sizes, in all industries and located across the globe, now require applications to be running and data to be always available. The needs of these organizations go far beyond simply recovery, requiring an environment that maintains business continuity during and immediately after a disaster. To make it more interesting, the number and types of applications that require this level of protection is very diverse.

Many Businesses Fail After a Disaster

webmaster — Thu, 27 May 2010 00:22:18 -0600

Businesses' reliance on IT systems and digital data has never been greater. The 2007 Best's Underwriting Guide found that only 6% of companies that suffer catastrophic data loss survive while 43% never reopen and 51% close within 2 years of the disaster. Best's Underwriting Guide 2007 also found that 93% of the companies that did not have their data backed up in the event of a disaster went out of business. An analysis of SMBs' prioritization of disaster recovery, backup and high availability for 2008 shows that businesses understand the risks to their business and the value of protection. However, many organizations still think that backup is a sufficient disaster recovery plan. However, mid-sized enterprises are at the most risk to disaster and are more likely to rely strictly on backup as a disaster recovery plan.

The needs and resources of mid-market firms are unique. Midsized companies must work with limited finances infrastructure and human resources. Robust disaster recovery used to be affordable and manageable only by large enterprises. Mid-sized enterprises relied more on backup than on a formal disaster recovery plan. As businesses' reliance on IT has grown, backup has increasingly shown its weaknesses. However, the introduction and maturation of several key technologies, such as virtualization, have brought affordable and easily implementable Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity to small and mid-sized companies. SMBs do not always equate virtualization with Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity because awareness of the many virtualization applications is just starting to grow.

Number of Mission Critical Applications Increases

webmaster — Tue, 11 May 2010 12:06:59 -0600

More processes are "mission-critical" as up to 60% of all applications in US-based medium-to-large enterprises are considered business-critical today (including email, collaboration, and intranet applications and data). This evolution demands that more systems, in more locations, that rely on more timely and sensitive data, be covered by Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity planning, and requires that datacenter operations teams provide tier-1 application support and data protection for a growing percentage of applications.

Threats drive need for disaster and business continuity plans

webmaster — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:19:44 -0600

With the ever changing economic climate and security threats, downtime and data loss pose intolerable risks to every business today. From CIOs to the Executive Suite, managers have seen the importance of business uptime and data protection to continued success, productivity and profitability. The Disaster Planning Template provides a road map to the most effective strategies and technologies to protect data and provide fast recovery should data be lost or corrupted due to accident or malicious action.

Planning for recovery - designing and implementing a solution to reduce the amount of recovery time needed after an interruption -is a pressing requirement for businesses of all sizes. In implementing an operational plan that ensures that both data and applications can be recovered quickly, IT managers are generally confronted with several challenges:

How can we ensure our applications and data are recoverable without impacting business operations?
Do we have data protection strategies available to us that meet my recovery point and recovery time objectives?
Can we afford to implement a comprehensive plan that covers both local and remote (disaster) recovery requirements?
Are there cost-effective alternatives that meet our requirements?

Disaster Recovery Planning International Standard Set by Janco

webmaster — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:10:07 -0600

Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template Now Accepted as the International Standard

Update to the Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template has just been released by Janco Associates..

Park City, UT - The Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Planning template has been sold to enterprise in over 65 countries around the globe. With the release the latest verison of the template it is in complete compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, ITIL (Ver 3), ISO 17799, and PCI DSS.

M V Janulaitis the CEO of Janco said, "Our DRP /BCP Template has been accepted by enterprise around the globe as the standard for disaster recovery plan and business continuity plan creation." In response to that need Janco has updated its "Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Template" by increasing the content of the template as well as updating the entire document to be compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, ITIL (Ver. 3), ISO 17799, and PCI DSS.

The Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan has been purchased for use in over 65 countries around the globe including:

Angola
Australia
Austria
Bahamas
Barbados
Belgium
Belize
Bermuda
Brazil
Bulgaria
Canada
Cayman Islands
Columbia
Croatia
Czech Republic
Denmark
Egypt

Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Honduras
Hungary
Iceland
India
Indonesia
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Japan
Jordan
Kenya
Lebanon
Lithuania

Macao
Malta
Mexico
Mozambique
Namibia
Netherlands
New Zealand
Nigeria
Norway
Panama
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Puerto Rico
Qatar
Republic of Ireland
Romania

Russia
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
South Africa
South Korea
Spain
Sri Lanka
Swaziland
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Trinidad & Tobago
Uganda
United Kingdom
United States
Venezuela
Zambia

The Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan has been purchased for use in government, public, and private enterprises in almost all industries including:

Federal Government
State Governments
Local Governments
Law Firms
Think Tanks
Chemical
Telecommunication
Real Estate
Manufacturing

Universities
School Districts
Consulting Firms
Banks
Financial Service
Investment Banks
Credit Unions
Outsourcers
Property Mgt

Heavy Industry
Light Industry
Distribution
Retail
Hospitality
Energy
Insurance
Medical
ISPs

Application Development
Construction
Graphics
Entertainment
Paper Products
Defense
Aerospace
Media

Outsouring Can Help in Disaster Recovery Planning

webmaster — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 21:11:59 -0600

Between hackers, natural disasters, or even a pipe breaking in the office above yours, every business needs a contingency plan. It could mean the difference between riding out a problem and going out of business. For this reason, most businesses are concerned about the safety of their backups. Data loss is a significant concern for any business - and in healthcare and other industries can have huge financial consequences. Solutions typically require that you spend more money on a third party backup solution. Outsourcing is one solution that should not be overlooked. Solutions typically require that you spend more money on a third party backup solution. Outsourcing is one solution that should not be overlooked.

Guidelines for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning

webmaster — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 18:17:03 -0600

Disaster recovery and business continuity are important business issues that require awareness and planning. Guidelines that can be used in this process are:

Look at the big picture - your business processes, systems, networks, data, and people all need to be considered when planning and implementing these processes.
Understand your levels of tolerance for lost work, missing data, and unproductive time.
Document and test your plans, and update them when business needs change.
Configure your environment to minimize the likelihood of a failure escalating into a disaster.
When evaluating technology solutions, take into account meeting your recovery objectives, kinds of disasters you're likely to face, and levels of cost, complexity, and disruption involved.
Know the advantages and limitations of each technology, and adjust your expectations accordingly.
Remember that backing up your data is the most reliable form of protection, without which your business is vulnerable.

Budget cuts impact disaster plans

webmaster — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:13:19 -0600

IT staff cuts spurred by the economy are likely to continue throughout the remainder of the year. According to a survey of 300 IT center managers last year, half of all data centers were planning to cut 2010 budgets by an average of 15%. Respondents at 14% of those companies said the cuts would include layoffs of IT staffers.

The PayPal electronic payment system is one of many Internet-based services that have been hit with outages. And based on news reports, the number of such incidents appears to have been increasing in recent months, analysts said. They cited shutdowns of the Google Apps software hosted by Google Inc., outages at data centers run by Rackspace Hosting Inc. and a distributed denial-of-service attack on Twitter.

Observers pointed to several possible reasons for the apparent uptick in online outages, including IT budget and personnel cutbacks, increasing corporate dependence on hosted applications -- and bad luck. Companies are not doing the maintenance we should be doing, and when you do not do maintenance, they increase the probability of catastrophic failure.

Which Files Need to be backed up

webmaster — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:08:13 -0600

Hard drives often contain hundreds of thousands of files. Many of them should be backed up every day, others only occasionally, and still others - including temp files, the hibernation file, and your browser cache--not at all.

Documents: You should back up your word processing files, spreadsheets, and similar documents every day. Most basic backup program perform incremental backups, in which the program copies only the files that have changed since the most recent previous backup. (Several backup programs also perform versioning; they keep several iterations of the same file on hand and enable you to choose which version to restore.)
Recent Documents: If your backup program can handle incremental backups, you don't have to worry about recent documents as separate entities. But if you often work on these files on other people's computers, you may want to carry a copy of them on a flash drive or store a copy of them online.
Application Data: Applications create and maintain data files such as e-mail messages, browser favorites, calendar entries, and contacts that require daily backing up. Many programs store them in a hidden folder inside your user folder (in XP, C:\Documents and Settings\your name\Application Data; in Vista, C:\Users\your name\AppData). Also, in XP, Microsoft stores Outlook and Outlook Express data in C:\Documents and Settings\your name\Local Settings\Application Data). Fortunately, any well-designed backup program intended for everyday, nonexpert users (as opposed to IT departments) knows where to look for Outlook data.

Operating System: You can always reinstall Windows and your apps, if you have the original discs or can download the programs. But if Windows becomes unusable or your hard drive crashes, switching to a system backup (also called a disaster recovery backup) that you create a couple of times a year can get your machine up and running smoothly without much effort.

Media: These large files require a separate backup strategy because of the amount of storage space they require..
Heirlooms: Files that you want to keep forever need backing up and extra protection.

Cost of email downtime is high

webmaster — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:37:21 -0600

In today's economy, the importance of e-mail takes on new meaning. Recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs) are no longer general rules. The Exchange administrator's ability to meet or exceed the proverbial lines in the sand, in terms of time to recover and the age of the data recovered, can mean the difference between gainful employment and prepping for a job interview. In fact, average yearly cost of Exchange downtime for a 500-person corporation, according to data derived from the Contingency Planning Association and Strategic Research, is over $1.5 million.

Disaster Recovery Planning Template Business Continuity Plan

Sarbanes - Oxley - ISO 27000 (27001 & 27002) - HIPAA - PCI- Compliant

Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) template can be used by any size enterprise. The template and supporting material have been updated to be Sarbanes-Oxley compliant. The Disaster Recovery Planning Documentation comes as a Word document and includes:

Disaster Recovery Plan Template
Business and IT Impact Analysis Questionnaire
Work Plan
Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Audit Program

Included in the template is Business Impact Questionnaire as well as a full Job Description for the Disaster Recovery Manager. The premium edition contains 11 full job descriptions.

Communication during a recovery process often is not well planned

webmaster — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 12:08:22 -0600

Disaster recovery and emergency team members status communication and news have distinct audiences with different needs when a crisis occurs.

Employees/General Populace: Need access to 'basic information' such as where to go, when to return to work, and how to locate general information about the crisis situation
Disaster Recovery Team Members: Need to account for all employees/constituents safety and assess the state of business operations; need the ability to communicate in real time, disseminate information, track recovery efforts, assign tasks and provision supplies, power, etc.; need the ability to have real time status of the situation
Executives/Leaders: Need to know that their employees and constituents are safe; need to know the status of their business and access a high level, real-time status of the recovery efforts; need to be able to communicate with customers, investors, and people external to their business about the crisis.

Effective crisis communication requires technology to provide a unified solution for communicating information to all involved constituents and should provide a single source of accurate and up-todate information that can be accessed.

Continuous Data Protection can be used as a backup strategy for DRP amd BCP

webmaster — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:11:50 -0600

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is an increasingly popular disk-based backup strategy. It is replication with an Undo button. Every time a block of data changes on the system being backed up, it is transferred to the CDP system. However, unlike replication, CDP stores changes in a log, so you can undo those changes at a very granular level. In fact, you can recover the system to literally any point in time at which data was stored within the CDP system.

A near-CDP system works in similar fashion except that it has discrete points in time to which it can recover. To put it another way, near-CDP combines snapshots with replication. Typically, a snapshot is taken on the system being backed up, whereupon that snapshot is replicated to another system that holds the backup.
Why take the snapshot on the source before replication? Because only at the source can you typically quiesce the application writing to the storage so that the snapshot will be a meaningful one.

Consolidation and Disaster Planning

webmaster — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 10:31:42 -0600

Most organizations today are faced with conflicting goals and challenges. They have geographically distributed workforces, with headquarters, datacenters, branch offices, and mobile workers scattered widely. Everyone needs to access email, file shares, and mission critical applications, and the speed of access directly ties to employee productivity. So computing resources have been widely deployed in many locations to give the local workers the best possible service delivery. However, this approach is now seen as wasteful and expensive with extra hardware and software to buy and maintain for many locations, and often few local IT staff to support the systems. As budgets get tighter, organizations are looking for solutions to handle this burden. IT consolidation is the number one approach today, taking infrastructure out of remote offices and into the main data center as a way to cut costs and boost IT staff productivity. The trick is how to consolidate without hurting the performance for the end users.

While consolidation can certainly bring a number of benefits to organizations, it will take more than just a Friday afternoon to
ensure that your consolidation, disaster recovery, and business continuity projects are truly successful. As far too many IT managers will tell you, a poorly planned project will have your executives screaming, users threatening mutiny, and IT in the hot seat to quickly undo all the effort that went into the project in the first place.

Lay out a change and risk management strategy
Develop a plan for resiliency
Test (and improve) branch office performance & local consolidation
Architect a forward-looking infrastructure & support plan
Plan a phased roll-out

Lack of disaster planning led to present crisis

webmaster — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 12:21:57 -0600

Everyone came to the same conclusion: A lack of disaster planning was a key component to the extent of the damage and loss of life.

Seventeen charity and civil society organizations met at the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry (JCCI) to organize their efforts after a few days of spontaneous but much appreciated mobilized work to collect and distribute donations in the affected areas. This followed a warning issued by the Governorate cautioning individuals and groups against donating haphazardly and instead directed them to give their donations through registered charity organizations, which are supposed to coordinate their distribution work with the Jeddah Governorate to ensure that the donations reach those who need them.

Discussions quickly revealed a lack of coordination among the charities and with the relevant government offices, namely the Civil Defense and the governorate. While several charities focused on the hardest hit areas, which needed every parcel of assistance it could get, other areas that were also hit hard were almost neglected. It turns out that Al-Sawaed, which has become a ghost town with only ruins, and all the Kilo areas and Mahameed were in bad shape. Poor neighborhoods in downtown Jeddah such as Ghulail and Karantina were also stricken with residents living in knee-high stinking sewage with barely the essentials to live by. Other areas hit hard include Um Alsalam, Bahra, Jamaa, Al-Musaid.

Recovery time is focus of 57% of Business Continuity Managers

webmaster — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:09:13 -0600

In a recent survey it was found that 57 percent of IT organizations see reducing recovery time in the event of IT failure and cutting the cost of backup as the two biggest pain-points for backup and disaster recovery. The next most significant difficulties were the ability to roll back to any point in time when recovering workloads and recovery testing.

Virtualization is already in place with the majority of those surveyed, with 86 percent of those questioned having a virtual infrastructure in place within their organizations.

Other findings are:

Tape backup is the most popular technology involved for recovery of virtual machines, with 60 percent of organizations relying on tape to protect their virtualization implementations. 53 percent of organizations are using disk-to-disk backup products, while proprietary virtualization products are used by 23 percent;
17 percent of organizations are only using tape backup for the backup / recovery of their virtual machines;
The number of respondents that were able to judge their recovery point objectives (RPO) when it came to virtualized environments was much lower than those able to define their recovery time objectives (RTO) - only 45 percent of those surveyed were able to state their satisfaction level around their RPOs.

DVDs Last Only Two to Five Years

webmaster — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:41:39 -0600

The National Archives warns - "CD/DVD experiential life expectancy is 2 to 5 years even though published life expectancies are often cited as 10 years, 25 years, or longer. However, a variety of factors discussed in the sources cited in FAQ 15, below, may result in a much shorter life span for CDs/DVDs. Life expectancies are statistically based; any specific medium may experience a critical failure before its life expectancy is reached. Additionally, the quality of your storage environment may increase or decrease the life expectancy of the media. We recommend testing your media at least every two years to assure your records are still readable."

Busines continuity planning is impacted by this. However there may be a solution. Start-up claims its DVDs last 1,000 years - The DiamonDisc uses standard DVD players and burn software and Cranberry's DiamonDisc product holds a standard 4.7GB of data, which roughly amounts to 2,000 photos, or 1,200 songs, or three hours of video, but the media is unharmed by heat as high as 176 degrees Fahrenheit, ultraviolet rays or normal material deterioration, according to the company. DiamonDiscs contain no dye layers, adhesive layers or reflective materials that could deteriorate.

Testing and training models for a disaster recovery and business continuity plan

webmaster — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:16:36 -0600

After you created your disaster recovery and business continuity plan you are not done. In reality your disaster recovery and business continuity plan are useless until you test them and train your staff in how to activate and use them. The key is to incorporate testing and training as part of the overall disaster recovery and business continuity management process.

Testing and Training Models

Plan Review

In a plan review, the disaster recovery and business continuity plan owner and team discuss the disaster recovery and business continuity plan. They look for missing elements and inconsistencies within the plan or with the organization. This type of exercise is comparable to plan auditing, and is useful to train new members of a team, including the business function owner.

Walk-Thru

In a walk-thru exercise, participants gather in a room to execute documented plan activities in a stress-free environment. Walk-thru exercises can effectively demonstrate whether team members know their duties in an emergency and if they need training. Documentation errors, missing information and inconsistencies across disaster recovery and business continuity plan can be identified in a walk-thru exercise.

Simulation

To determine if disaster recovery and business continuity management procedures and resources work in a realistic situation, a simulation exercise helps. This exercise uses established disaster recovery and business continuity resources, such as the recovery site, backup equipment, services from recovery vendors and transportation. It can require sending teams to alternate sites to restart technology as well as business functions. Errors, omissions, missing or insufficient resources, incomplete coverage, and limited vendor capabilities may surface in this exercise. Simulations may also uncover staff issues regarding the nature and the size of their tasks. The use of a scenario is highly recommended for simulations.

Objectives

Why exercise in the first place? The primary objective is to ensure that the plan works when it is needed. But it is not enough to exercise parts of a plan. Ideally all elements of disaster recovery and business continuity plans should be exercised at least once a year if not quarterly. Each exercise may have different objectives, beside the primary one.

Main exercise objectives include identifying weaknesses and shortcomings, verifying recovery objectives and procedures, validating global efficiency of plans, verifying the adequacy of emergency operations centers (EOCs) and alternate sites, and achieving specific recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPO).

How much should you test?

Tests can be simple or complex. A table-top exercise can establish a plan performance baseline. A specialized test, such as one which focuses on crisis management procedures at an EOC, provides valuable information about specific activities. At a higher level, an integrated exercise can address multiple disaster recovery and business continuity plans or plan components. Finally, an entire plan, with all components, can be exercised. It is far better to err on the side of exercising too much, rather than not enough.

Managing human resources

Tests present human resource issues. Tests are important for validating team member expertise and identifying training opportunities. Conversely, people could refuse to work overnight, weekends or be away from home even a few days. Be sure to discuss and resolve these issues with human resources management.

During disaster recovery and business continuity plan tests, it is good practice to treat team members well, especially when they are away from home or working difficult hours. Be sure to budget for appropriate hotel accommodations and food, while managing costs.

Effective test strategies

The test options will help improve disaster recovery and business continuity plans and train staff. But no matter how often you exercise plans, when reality strikes, your response capability could be much different than in the exercises.

Key strategies for testing include starting simple; raising the bar in terms of difficulty; involving vendors and stakeholders in exercises; making objectives increasingly difficult to achieve; and launching surprise exercises. When launching an exercise program, start with plan reviews and walk-thrus. This will help staff get comfortable with the exercise process. As they improve, increase the level of exercise complexity. Remember that if an exercise fails, it is not a failure; rather, it is a success. It is far better to identify systems and procedures that may fail, and rectify them, before a real incident occurs. Finally, a true test is to launch a surprise incident. This will truly test how well prepared the organization is to address a real incident.

What is a successful test?

The primary reason to exercise is to identify limitations of disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Recognizing that most organizations change frequently, even mature business continuity plans may be inappropriate in a given situation or at a given time. Tests that appear to be successful and uncover no problem should be suspect. Maybe the objectives were too easy or the situation was unrealistic. Exercises present opportunities to fix problems before a disaster happens.

A successful test uncovers and documents problems. Once the problems have been fixed, consider running a follow-up test to ensure the repairs work. Measuring the success of disaster recovery and business continuity tests means having relevant objectives that will help uncover problems. Testing is your chance to push your disaster recovery and business continuity plans increasingly closer to the reality of a disaster.