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Disaster Recovery Plan Testing Transcription

Welcome to our BCP and DRP testing and maintenance module. It is important that you continuously review your business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan and this is a training exercise for your entire team. An exercise is a simulation of a potential disaster or emergency, which will be helpful to validate the viability of your aspects of your BCP or DRP.

You have several different options to test here. You can just do a read through where you evaluate the steps using a checklist and this is basically just a paperwork-based validation exercise by your staff. You can perform a walk-through, where you examine the process flow basically stepping through each phase of the process.

You can conduct simulations of the process or of different phases by using drills or exercises. One of the problems here though is that you may shut down some of your business units, so you wanna make sure that you only shut down non-critical units. You can perform parallel testing where you test the functionality of your alternate site and examine the performance.

Here you're relocating your data and your staff and this should not affect your day-to-day operations. A full-interruption test is the most extensive type of testing. Here you are shutting down your entire facility and relocating all of your resources to your alternate site. This will be the most costly type of testing, but is the best way to prepare for any type of disaster that may occur.

Your disaster recovery plan testing will help you to determine if you can actually recover from a disaster or not. It will help you to test your plan and train your staff by using a pre-determined scenario that simulates a disaster. You should determine your goals before you begin testing.

And during the test, you should document any successes and failures and apply any lessons learned to your disaster recovery plan. You should perform an exercise at least once per year and you should remember that for the CISSP examination. You will not have any confidence in your plan until you test it and this is why testing is important.

When you're conducting a test, you should look for any issues that need to be improved upon and this is not to find fault or place blame, but rather to ensure that your disaster recovery plan will be successful if a disaster occurs. The type of testing that you conduct will be based upon the criticality of your organization, your risk tolerance, and the amount of resources that you have available to conduct the test.

The continuity plan will need to be reviewed frequently to make sure that is accurate and complete. You should make sure that your contacts list and your plan for moderate- or high-impacts systems are reviewed more often than the recommended once per year because contacts could change frequently, as well as your systems.

The review of your plan should focus on your security requirements, operational requirements, technical procedures that are part of the plan, any types of hardware or software or other equipment that you'll need. The names and contact information of all your team members, your alternate and offsite vendors, as well as your offsite facility requirements, and your vital records.

Your vital records should be maintained in electronic and hard copy because if your system is destroyed, you will not be able to access the electronic copy. The hard copy should be maintained in the facility and you should also have an offsite copy in case there is a fire or other disaster that prevents you from obtaining the hard copy out of the facility or if something destroys the hard copy.

You should be assured that any changes you deem appropriate are applied following your company's change management procedures. This concludes our BCP and DRP testing and maintenance module. Thank you for watching.