Disaster Recovery Testing-Key to a successful DR

Disasters can occur at any time and at any place and can be very cruel. Having a disaster recovery plan sure can help an enterprise in protecting their data but in order for it to do that, it needs to work first. The only way to know for sure that your disaster recovery plan will actually work is to test it, regularly.

Exactly How is Testing Important for an Enterprise

So much emphasis is made on building a disaster recovery plan but enterprises often forget that they actually need to make sure that their DR plan works or not.

An untested plan is just a set of steps in which some things might work and some might not. In order to ensure efficiency, all the steps of a DR plan should work. So, testing your DR backup plan is as important as setting up one.

Decide What Needs to be Tested

Testing a DR plan maybe simple or a bit complex, depending on your system. If there is only a single testing, then it may be quite simple rather than a multi-tiered system. Depending upon the criticality of your system, you need to test the plan accordingly.

Testing Frequency

Having talked about the importance of a DR plan testing it is also important to know the frequency of the tests performed on it.

The testing frequency should be based on how often your plan changes. If it changes a lot, then it should also be testing a lot frequently. If not so much, then it’s okay to test it only once a while.

To emphasize more on this, workloads or systems that don’t change at all only need to be tested maybe once a year, while workloads that tend to change a lot need to be regularly tested throughout the year.

More Efficient Disaster Recovery

Testing your DR plan enables you to identify any errors or issues encountered while recovering your data. This helps greatly as it pin-points exactly what the issue is and allows you to resolve it so that, at the time of actually needed recovery, there are no issues and all your files and systems are recovered, easily and efficiently.

Conclusion

Testing your DR plan is undoubtedly a very vital part of any DR backup plan. It can help greatly in identifying the issues or problems you might face while recovering your files and gives you an idea of whether your DR backup plan works or not. To ensure a more efficient DR backup plan, make sure you test your plan regularly. veeam cloud connect azure is also good for doing data backups.