Disaster Recovery Plan
A disaster recovery plan is one of the necessary aspects for the business to be successful. A Disaster Recovery plan prepares the procedures, people, steps, places, and equipment for restoring computer systems necessary to restore damaged or destroyed computer systems, as well as the secondary infrastructure to retrieve business data after a disaster. This paper describes the key elements of a disaster recovery plan, the five methods of testing a DRP, as well as testing requirements.
In order to ensure that a business is prepared for a disaster there are several key elements that identify a disaster recovery plan such as:
- Analyzing and developing an emergency response, and categorizing the type of emergency
- Response planning which includes the evaluation of each risk, determination of the occurrence probability, and developing an suitable response
- Assigning personnel’s responsibilities
- Employees’ training and testing the elements of the response planning
The best way to be confident in your Disaster Recovery plan is to test it. The plan must be tested over and over in order to remove uncertainties and mitigating risk, thus, it will be ready to apply when a disaster occurs. According to the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), there are five methods of testing the DRP:
- Walk-through-the plan’ steps are identified by the key members of the business
- Simulations-performing the practice sessions which are imitations of true emergency situations
- Checklists-key members responsible for particular tasks check and report the accuracy of the checklist
- Parallel testing-involves testing product or subcomponents simultaneously
- Full interruption-system’s stoppage in case a disaster occurs to verify if the backup services work.
So, why a disaster recovery plans requires testing? With every testing it brings the company a step closer to success by making changes to the plan so that the next text is successful. Moreover, if the test fails to carry out the goals, analyzing and taking actions for correcting the plan will save the company from any further dangers.
