CISSP For Dummies

By the time that an organization has completed a DRP, it will probably have spent hundreds of man-hours and possibly tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on consulting fees. You would think that after making this large of an investment, any organization would want to test its DRP to make sure that it works when a real emergency strikes.

Five methods available for testing the Disaster Recovery Plan are

• Checklist: This amounts to a review or read-through of the disaster recovery plan documentation. By itself, this is an insufficient way to test a DRP; however, it’s a logical starting place. One of the following tests should be performed afterwards.

• Structured walkthrough: A team of experts in the organization perform the step-by-step review of the DRP (and preferably in a fancy mountain retreat, where they can think much more clearly).

• Simulation: In a simulation, all the designated disaster recovery personnel practice going through the motions associated with a real recovery. In a simulation, the team doesn’t actually perform any recovery or alternate processing.

• Parallel: A parallel test involves performing all the steps of a real recovery except that the real, live production computers are kept running. They run in parallel with the disaster recovery computers. This is a very time-consuming test, but it does test the accuracy of the applications because analysts compare data on the test recovery systems with production data.

• Interruption: An interruption test is similar to a parallel test except that in an interruption test, a function’s computer systems are actually shut off or disconnected. An interruption test is the ultimate test of a disaster recovery plan because one or more of the business’s critical functions actually depends upon the availability, integrity, and accuracy of the recovery systems.

 Instant Answer   The parallel test includes the loading of data onto recovery systems without taking production systems down.