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Disaster Recovery

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It is now generally recognised that Disaster Recovery Planning (or Business Continuity Planning) is a vital activity for any organisation.  Whilst having a good Disaster Recovery Plan is essential to maintaining the continuity of the business, in the case of large corporations it also seriously impacts on commercial matters such as their credit ratings, cost of insurance and share prices.  Hence, Disaster Recovery Planning is evolving into a mature part of an organisation and the emphasis on having a fully-tested Disaster Recovery solution is significant.

Prior to the creation of the Disaster Recovery Plan, it is essential to consider the potential impacts of a disaster and to understand the underlying risks and threats.  Upon these foundations, the plan must be constructed, maintained and audited to ensure that it remains appropriate to the needs of the organisation.

However, simply producing a Disaster Recovery Plan is worthless if it remains untested.  You must be sure that the plan meets all the requirements and is fully understood by all parties.  A complete suite of Disaster Recovery Tests should assess the Resilience, Availability & Recoverability qualities of an end-to-end solution in order to observe its behaviour in case of failure, and its ability to either continue to operate and/or recover from this failure.  In general, this is done at a system level, rather than the validation of specific functional error scenarios:

  • Resilience and Availability Testing - Most commercial systems today employ a multi-tiered architecture with redundancy and failover methodologies applied at each tier in order to provide some level of protection against component failure, and therefore allowing their services to continue operating in a lower throughput state.  By avoiding a single point of failure in this way, system downtime can be reduced and High Availability (HA) can be achieved.  Maintaining High Availability is especially valuable for 24-hour sectors such as e-commerce, where problems cannot be fixed overnight and the failure of a retail website for even a few minutes may result in loss of sales.
High Availability is therefore very desirable, with requirements often being explicitly stated in terms of the percentage of downtime that is acceptable.  For example, 99% Availability equates to downtime of no more than 1.68 hours per week, 7.20 hours per month or 3.65 days per year. 
It is very important to test these features in order to ensure that the system as a whole is either able to continue operating or is capable of failing gracefully should part of a system fail.  Testhouse is able to measure Resilience and Availability by applying pressure to your system.  This can be done by simulating both single- and multiple-point failures whilst exposing it to simulated usage patterns in order to monitor the effect of the failures on the user experience.
  • Recoverability Testing - In any enterprise system, whether it is a small office management system or a huge multi-site banking system, the backup and recovery of vital user and corporate data is possibly the single most important part of the system.  Without a reliable system for the backup of your data you could potentially lose all the company’s important information.  Testhouse can help you to develop a reliable and exhaustive backup and recovery strategy.  We can also test the impact of your strategy upon the rest of your systems performance, and provide an insight in how to best configure your system to allow for a quicker backup or recovery, whilst minimising the impact on the users experience.
 
Disaster Recovery Testing will provide you with peace of mind when it comes to the ability of your system to survive in the event of a component or system failure.  Testhouse considers all these issues and will assist with risk analysis to help you create, maintain, audit and test the plan. Whether you are entirely new to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning, or whether you already have a proven and established plan, our services would be of real value.
 

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