Key Questions
The first step in testing your disaster recovery plan is to ask yourself and your team some poignant questions and respond in simple terms, maybe even 1 word answers. Depending on how you and your team answer these questions dictates how the fire drill can be conducted.
SLA - What is your Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the business or your customers?
Cost - What is the tangible cost of downtime for your users, application, business, etc?
Prevention - What type of disaster are you trying to prevent?
Recovery - What type of disaster are you trying to recover from?
Time - How much time and money do you have to spend on building, testing and maintaining the disaster recovery plan on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis?
Priority - Where does the disaster recovery plan fit into the organizational, departmental and personal priority list?
Need - What are the true disaster recovery risks for your organization based on where you are located, your line of business, your affiliations, etc?
Responsibility - What are your disaster recovery responsibilities and why do you have those responsibilities?
Plan - Do you have a documented disaster recovery plan?
Testing - Have you tested the disaster recovery plan?
Documentation - Do you update your documentation as dependent objects change? Or monthly? Or quarterly?
People - Will you have people to support the business?
Power - Will you have power to support the business?
Access - Will you be able to get to the office or make a remote connection?
Process - Will you have a process that everyone on the team can follow?
Technology - Have you invested in technology that will improve the prevention or recovery from a disaster?
Dependencies - Are you and your team dependent on other teams or external entities in order for your applications to operate properly? Do those teams test their plans on a regular basis?
Mitigation - Have you put multiple lines of defenses up to prevent a disaster as well as recover from one?
Limits - How long can your business run without the IT infrastructure and applications?
Alternatives - Can the business run on paper based operations for a finite period of time?
Experience - If you have an entire backup site\infrastructure have you failed over to it during a low usage period such as a Saturday or Sunday so the business really knows how the applications will perform even with a limited number of users?
Impacts - If you have an extended downtime, what will that do to your business in terms of customer loyalty, industry reputation, cash flow, etc?
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