If your company has a disaster recovery (DR) plan, that’s better than nothing. However, many businesses will stop here—which is unfortunate.
Reality Is Unpredictable
While a disaster recovery plan may look good on paper, reality may play out completely differently. Restoration processes that are assumed to be working may not be working at all. Never assume a DR plan works without running any tests.
To test whether a DR plan works, we recommend you run disaster recovery simulations. By running simulations, you can figure out where your plan fails, and where amendments to the plan need to be made. How long does it take to bring your business from completely offline to back online? Without ever trying, it’s impossible to know.
Disaster Recovery Simulations Can Be Messy
One thing you must keep in mind—disaster recovery simulations can be messy. By simulating the IT environment of a disaster, you may inadvertently wreck your company’s data. That’s why it’s important to start small, running smaller simulations within smaller divisions of your company. You need to gradually work your way up, inviting and adding more company divisions to take part in the disaster recovery simulations.
Your company must understand that having backup and recovery solutions in place isn’t the end. It’s only the beginning. Without allocating time to simulate situations where it’s necessary to restoring from dedicated cloud-hosted data backups, you’re at risk.
Be Ready For Pushback
It’s likely that there will be individuals in your company that push back against running DR simulations. But, real disasters do happen. A company that hasn’t had a disaster situation before is especially vulnerable to disasters. Likely, your colleagues have no idea what will go wrong, and will be ill-equipped for said events.
Without the knowledge gained from running disaster recovery simulations, a disaster recovery plan is just words on paper. It’s untested—it’s theory. If your company has gone through the effort of writing a disaster recovery plan in the first place, it makes sense to see that effort through. Run some simulations.
If you need help running disaster recovery simulations, contact us. We can provide you with tips, or play a larger role in helping you run these simulations.