About this interactive
Without testing a disaster recovery plan, nobody knows whether it works. The lesson gives four ways to test it.
- A live failover moves the customers off the live site and onto the backup site. It is the truest test, but if anything goes wrong customers are down, and the company can miss its recovery time objective.
- A tabletop exercise, or walkthrough, brings the team together with the instructions and goes through them step by step, correcting things along the way. No system is touched.
- A simulation runs the plan in a stand-in environment: a virtual environment, or a staging environment that comes before production. It is not exactly like production, but it checks the checklists and processes.
- Parallel processing brings up the backup copy beside the live system, for example by severing the connection between the two and testing the copy, without failing customers over to it.
Whatever the method, other than a tabletop, tell everyone who could be affected: a test of staging once turned out to depend on the live copy and caused an outage. Each test feeds changes back into the plan.
Security+ lists tabletop exercises, failover, simulation and parallel processing as ways to test resilience. Another lesson in this course, Training and Testing Plans, uses parallel processing for a test on a staging or virtual system; Security+ and this lesson call that a simulation and keep parallel processing for the recovery copy run beside production.
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