Perhaps the most crucial aspect of a disaster recovery (DR) plan is testing it for effectiveness. Although companies understand its importance, their management teams either don’t perform them or don’t conduct them regularly enough. The following will discuss why people neglect testing, technologies that aid tests, and the mistakes most frequently made during testing.

DR Testing Neglected

According to a recent study, nearly 30% do not have a schedule for tests. Moreover, about 5% do not test at all. The chief excuses made involved lacking resources and the complexity and costs of testing. Fortunately, methods now exist that make testing easier. There is disaster recovery as a service or DRaaS, which is gaining popularity, and the provider can assist a company prepare a DR test plan. However, DR tests do require much time and effort, and they are the only way to test if the plan works.

In spite of all the discussions regarding DR testing, most firms do not perform them frequently enough. This results in recovery point objectives (RPOs) being far too high to make DR possible, according to a survey conducted with more than 300 IT executives in charge of disaster recovery for their companies. It was also found that about 60% ran DR tests a single time annually or even less. 33% tested their DR plan infrequently or not at all. Only 26% performed a test every quarter, while only 16% had monthly testing.

Why Not Enough Testing?

A total of 56% of respondents said tests were held infrequently because they had inadequate company resources for testing. About 35% said the process was far too complex. Almost 20% did not feel it was a priority. A bit more than 20% did not consider it a priority. More than 1 in 10 thought it was too expensive.

Survey respondents also complained that traditional Disaster Recovery products did not provide RPOs that were adequate. A total of 33% stated that their RPO lasted more than half a day. About 20% claimed it was for 2 hours, while 45% said the duration was from 2 to 12 hours.

An expert believed that DR planning was crippled because of a lack of resources allocated for testing. The typical portion of a company’s IT budget spent on disaster recovery is from 5% to 7%. If testing becomes even less frequent, mistakes will be magnified when worst-case circumstances call for a recovery attempt in the future.

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