10/20/2020 DR Test: Ensuring Your DR Plan Works

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Disaster Recovery Testing: Ensuring Your DR

Plan Works
By Jacqueline Emigh,
Posted May 28, 2019
Find out why disaster recovery tests are essential to all IT organizations,
and how to carry them out successfully and e ciently.

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Disaster recovery testing is a multi-step drill of an organization's disaster

recovery plan (DRP) designed to assure that information technology (IT)
systems will be restored if an actual disaster occurs.

As part of a DR plan, companies typically hire a disaster recovery service.

Why is Disaster Recovery Testing

Essential?
During a disaster, a natural or man made event interrupts normal IT
functionality like data processing, communications, virtualization, and
network and data center operations.

Research consistently shows that the loss of IT functions in a disaster leads

to business failure. For instance, a full 93 percent of companies which lose
their computer systems for 10 days or more because of disaster le for
bankruptcy within 12 months of the event, according to the U.S. National
Archives & Records Administration.

Hurricanes such as Katrina and Sandy, earthquakes, oods, and

tsunami are all potentially business-ending.

Man made disasters can knock a business o ine, include acts of

terrorism, computer vandalism, sabotage, and inadvertent mishaps
such as hardware miscon gurations and accidentally deleted les.

Disasters don't occur very often, but when they do, the effects can be
devastating.

The main objective of DRT is to make sure that, in case a disaster does
happen, the DR plan will actually work.  A company's DR site will go live, IT
systems will go back online with minimal downtime. Perhaps a company
uses cloud-based DR, or DRaaS – in either case, DR testing reveals whether
the backup is truly as foolproof as it needs to be.

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Ongoing testing is a necessity, since the effectiveness of the DRP can be

impacted by the inevitable changes to personnel, skill levels, and hardware
and software architectures within an organization.

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Fully testing your disaster recovery plan is an absolutely critical aspect of

having a DR plan.

Disaster Recovery Scenarios

DR testing plans can help organizations prepare for just about any type of IT
disaster, including the following kinds of scenarios, which have unfolded in
real life.

In an insider sabotage attack, a company disabled access for a

software engineer just before ring him. However, the disgruntled
employee had logged into the system from home earlier in the week
and left his remote connection open. After the ring, he used this
connection to delete several critical les from a manufacturing app. The
company lost four hours of manufacturing time before being able to
reload backup data and start up manufacturing again, says a study
published by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).

In 2017, enterprises that included FedEx, Maersk, Merck, and many

others fell victim to a ransomware-inspired virus called NotPetya. After
its global shipping business ground to a halt, Maersk later admitted to
taking a $670 million hit from technology cleanup, business disruptions,
and lost sales. For its part, FedEx lost $400 million.

In contrast, with advance warning of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005, the

City of New Orleans managed to keep important business functions
running without interruption during and after the deadly storm. The city
downloaded critical systems such as nancial management and
shipped them in advance to an ACS data center in California. The city's
web sites were moved from City Hall to a data center in Dallas operated
by Red Carpet Host. Following Katrina, the city set up a backup data
center in Austin. 

Disaster Recovery vs. Business

Continuity Planning

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Disaster recovery planning and testing is a term often confused with

business continuity planning (BCP). While DRP and BCP are closely related,
however, they are not the same.

A DR plan and testing system speci es the steps an IT organization must

take to recover systems that will meet the company's technology needs after
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a disaster.

A BCP, on the other hand, spells out what a business must do to make sure
that its products and services remain available to customers. A BCP is made
up of a business impact analysis, risk assessment, and an overall business
continuity strategy. It is tested through a business continuity test (BCT).

Some organizations treat DRP/DRT and BCP/BCT separately, while others

include DR within overall business continuity planning and testing.

5 DR Testing Techniques
Beyond restoring data and keeping critical applications and services online
during the emergency, DR solutions should include ways to alert staff about
the disaster and to allow communications during and after the event if
regular phone lines and networks go down.

In the planning and testing process, DR teams should also recognize that,
despite the disaster, the organization must continue to meet its security and
regulatory compliance obligations.

Five types of DRTs are used to test disaster recovery solutions:

Paper test: In a paper test, members of the DR team read and annotate
recovery plan documents such as DR policies, procedures, timelines,
benchmarks, and checklists.  A hard copy of documents should be
stored in a secure o ine environment, and a digital copy in the cloud.

Walk through test: A walk through test is a group walk through of the
DRP to pinpoint any issues that need to be addressed and any
modi cations that should be made to the disaster recovery
environment.

Simulation:  In a procedure somewhat along the lines of a re drill,

teams practice the DRP in real life to make sure that it's su cient for IT
disaster recovery.

Parallel test: In a parallel test, failover recovery systems are tested to

make sure that, in case of disaster, they can perform real business
transactions supporting key processes and applications. Meanwhile,
primary systems continue to run the full production workload.

Cutover test: A cutover test goes further to test failover recovery

systems built to take over the full production workload in case of
disaster. Primary systems are disconnected during the test.

Six Disaster Recovery Testing Levels

In parallel and cutover testing, IT systems can be tested at differing levels of
comprehensiveness. IT organizations vary as to levels of testing performed,
as do DR service providers.

Data Verification

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This level of testing checks that blocks / les are good after they've been
backed up, but does not ensure the applications can be functionally
recovered.

Database Mounting
Database mounting veri es a that a database has basic functionality within
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backups.

Single Machine Boot Verification

Single machine boot veri cation veri es that a single server can be rebooted
after it's gone down.

Single Machine Boot with Screenshot Verification

This test sends an image of the operating system to administrators as proof
that a server can be rebooted. However, it does not prove that the server will
still be functional to the business.

DR Runbook Testing
Involving multiple servers, DR runbook testing is used mainly with multiple
machines which deliver a business service together, such as clustered
database or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Recovery Assurance
The highest level of testing, recovery assurance encompasses multiple
machines, deep application testing, service level agreement (SLA)
assessment, and analytics as to the reason why any rollback to system
recovery failed. Some but not all DRaaS providers offer recovery assurance
testing.

Disaster Recovery Testing Best Practices

Test regularly and thoroughly
Some large organizations do DR testing on a quarterly basis. Yet despite
publicity around disaster recovery lessons learned, 23 percent of businesses
never test disaster recovery, whereas about 33 percent test once or twice a
year. Further, out of the companies that do test their DRPs, about 65 percent
fail their own DRTs, according to one survey.

While the frequency of testing will depend on your business and its DR
readiness, experts strongly advise doing a full test at least once per year.

Set Measurable Benchmarks

For critical applications, set RPO and RTO (recovery time objectives and
recovery point objectives), which are measurable on a scale. The purposes of
these benchmarks are to make sure you're reaching your objectives while
also detailing the processes accounting for success.

Some industries, including health care, require organizations to know and

document their RTOs. Regardless of which industry you're in, by using
benchmarks that are measured on a scale, rather than just pass/fail, you're
better equipped to identify DR procedures which need improvement.

Keep DR Team Members on Their Toes

Clearly de ne all individuals responsible for researching, developing,
implementing, and testing the DRP. Assign a backup person for each role in a
DR exercise in case the designated individual is out of the o ce. Share the
DRP and DRT with all team members.

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If team members leave the company, make sure that their replacements are
trained on DRP and DRT policies and procedures. Then arrange for a group
run-through of the DRT to smooth out disaster recovery processes.

Work with a DR Partner If You Need One

While big organizations have the internal expertise on hand to perform DRT
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themselves, many smaller companies turn to DR companies for assistance.

Beyond the multifaceted DRaaS, disaster recovery service providers offer

specialized services such as ongoing testing and 24/7 performance
monitoring of customers' DR solutions.

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Recommend Share 1 Comment

Jonathan Kabata - 1 month ago

This is very informative. I do have a

question though during the testing.
How should an organization prepare
for a media outburst during a DR
testing phase.There are plans to
handle if there was a real disaster
however during the testing, how
should they go about it? To prevent
losing reputation and recognition of
clients.

An eWEEK Property

        

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