Is your disaster recovery a house of cards? Why BIA, BCP, and DRP are your foundation

Testing should involve key players responsible for response and recovery, not just the IT department. In addition, these parties may include legal, crisis management, LOB directors, business leaders team, communications, etc.

Business continuity resources should be engaged for tabletop and working tests to ensure complete communication processes, documentation, resiliency plans, and stakeholder engagement are aligned with mitigating the impact and accelerating recovery. Testing should involve not just recovery of IT systems, but mitigation of impacts on staff work (e.g., where staff would work, how they would receive communications, acceptable levels of performance during recovery, order of recovery, etc.). This would include communications plans, alternative working locations, mapping resources to services, defining roles in response, and providing runbooks for disaster scenarios and their business continuity impacts.

IDC’s January 2023 report titled IDC PlanScape: Disaster Recovery Testing for On-Premises, Hybrid Cloud, Multicloud, and DRaaS Models indicated that successful DR/BCP testing requires clear roles and responsibilities across the organization and that tests should include both DR (technical) and BC (business) risks and mitigations. Key roles involved are: