Disaster Recovery Testing is the process to ensure that an organisation can recover data, restore business critical applications and continue operations after an interruption of its services, critical IT failure or complete disruption.
A disaster recovery test (DR test) checks every step from a disaster recovery plan as outlined in an organisation’s business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) planning process.
Usually, the DR testing process is neglected by many organisation which makes things very difficult to recover when disruption occurs.
Main goals of Disaster Recovery Testing
Communications, data recovery and application recovery are typically a focus of all disaster recovery testing.
Disaster Recovery Plan
It’s very important to understand the following:
- how long does it take for the services to recover?
- how long does it take to recover the data?
- which are the services/data affected?
- how will the system behave if part of the infrastructure becomes unavailable?
Disaster recovery tests should be scheduled and executed on a regular basis throughout the year and be incorporated into all planned maintenance and staff training.
Audit logs and other data should be analysed to determine what worked / didn’t work as expected, what changes need to be made in the DR plan.
Disaster Recovery Testing can be executed while the application is under heavy load and carried out in conjunction with Load Testing and Website Speed Testing.