Having a secure Disaster Recovery plan in place is essential to preventing the losses associated with system outages. In 2014 alone, Australian businesses lost over $55 billion in US dollars due to data loss and downtime. Despite this very real risk, only 78% of Australian organisations feel confident in their ability to recover from a disaster quickly.
One of the biggest obstacles to having a successful plan for business continuity in place is adequate testing. If a plan isn’t regular tested, then it may not be there to deliver when a disaster occurs, leaving businesses vulnerable to lost revenue, data loss, and lost productivity, let alone the potential negative impact on a brand’s reputation when a serious IT outage occurs.
Why DR Testing Is Crucial for Your Business
To ensure continuity, tests should be conducted at least once a year, with the results recorded and analysed. Disaster Recovery (DR) testing will demonstrate whether or not failover will automatically kick in and your business will be able to fully:
- Restore essential applications
- Recover data
- Continue services without a gap in operations
Testing will highlight where any holes are so they can be properly addressed and what tasks should be retested.
Why Do Businesses Neglect Testing?
Many organisations fail to perform effective testing because of a lack of resources. DR testing requires setting aside the time and IT manpower to create a plan, implement it, and manage the results. Unfortunately, if your business isn’t completing DR testing you may be at risk from cyber-attacks, natural disasters and human error.
Karl Palachuk, Technology Author and Senior System Engineer explains, “The bottom line is that preparation will make disaster recovery go as smoothly as possible. Having technical knowledge and a vague idea of what needs to be done is simply not enough.”
Making Your Business Disaster Proof
Your business has two options when it comes to DR testing. You can do it yourself, conducting a comprehensive annual test along with more regular tasks to ensure the greatest degree of protection. This includes:
- Testing every business application
- Reviewing passwords to ensure they are strong enough and changed on a regular basis
- Seeing if you can hack into your system and then taking action to solve vulnerabilities
- Creating a pretend event and testing the plan in action
With cloud-based technology, today many businesses are turning to their Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) providers to perform regular DR tests as an affordable and effective option. DRaaS simplifies the testing process by allowing failover and failback of services to occur separately. Meaning your business won’t have to set aside time and resources to conduct regular tests, while still getting the advantages of having a secure, fluidly functioning DR plan in place.
Zetta makes DR testing easy by providing a fully managed service, including testing and failover activation off-site. Tests are conducted independent of your business’s existing hardware so there is no risk of having your IT infrastructure affected during testing. Everything is performed in a virtualised IT environment.
DR testing is a critical part of your organisation’s recovery plan. No matter what industry you are in or the size of your business, DR is essential to running healthy business operations and being able to recover when problems occur. Zetta’s cloud-based comprehensive DR services are available, fully scalable, and powerful enough to provide the security, reliability, and peace of mind that your business needs. Find out more about Zetta’s DRaaS >>
