RES-04
Data resilience and continuity
Failover test and recovery exercise
Who it's for: an organisation with a documented recovery plan that has never been exercised, or whose last exercise is more than a year old.
The problem: the first real test invariably reveals undocumented dependencies — a secondary service, a name resolution, a service account, a start-up order. Better to discover them on a day you choose than on a day imposed on you.
What I do
- preparation of the scenario, the scope and the success criteria, validated before the exercise
- verification of technical prerequisites and an agreed stop point should the exercise drift
- execution of the failover under real conditions across the defined scope
- timing of the RTOs actually achieved and verification of the RPO observed
- application-level validation of the recovery with the business contacts, beyond simply starting up
- identification of missing dependencies and of blocking points
- controlled failback and integrity check afterwards
Deliverables
- exercise report with measured RTO/RPO against targets
- log of gaps and undocumented dependencies
- prioritised correction plan
- corrected failover procedure, repeatable by your own teams
What changes
your recovery plan moves from being a document to being a demonstrated capability, with an exercise record that stands up in an audit.
Prerequisites: a recovery environment available, a validated exercise window, infrastructure and business teams available for the duration of the exercise.
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