Disaster recovery systems are vital to the health of a company’s IT infrastructure. These systems ensure that if some form of company software failed, there’s a way to fix the problem and not lose or compromise any valuable information. Although, if these systems aren’t consistently tested, they can develop their own faults as new technologies and software are added to a company’s digital infrastructure. Read on as we discuss the value of consistent disaster recovery testing and four different methods to ensure quality tests.
Disaster recovery programs are put in place to safeguard data from being lost during a potential IT disaster. While testing these programs isn’t always the easiest or cheapest thing to do, it’s by far one of the most important. By regularly testing these systems, you’ll be able to identify and fix security or backup problems that could hinder a company’s ability to recover during outages.
How does one go about testing these systems? TechTarget detailed four of the most effective approaches in a recent article. They are:
Understand that data is not a static environment.
Whether it’s a new patch installation or a new complex software setup, every time a change is made to a data center there exists the potential to interfere with current disaster recovery platforms. The constant change to infrastructure is the reason that consistent testing is crucial.
Evaluate systems and look for single points of failure.
While it’s wise to review infrastructure from a component level, it’s important to take a look at each individual system as well. As networks are linked around the globe, something as small as one server going down could crash linked computers in cities all over the world.
Have a mechanism to automatically fail critical workloads over to an alternate data center.
Many companies have failover capabilities, but those failover systems simply aren’t enough. Companies must utilize a second data center which has enough resources to be able to handle a failover situation. While that sounds like common sense, as businesses scale, many overlook ensuring the second data center is scaled as well. If these extra backup centers don’t have enough resources, the whole disaster recovery system can fail.
Periodically evaluate bandwidth consumed by offsite storage replication.
Once a company has created a disaster recovery plan and incorporated a secondary data center, it has most likely created a data replication system that copies data to the secondary data center. As amounts of data increase, so does the amount of bandwidth used to replicate these files. If not properly monitored, that increase could lead to the bandwidth requirements eventually exceeding the link’s capacity and causing a failure in the backup system.
Disaster recovery programs and consistent testing are vital to protecting an enterprise from catastrophic data failure. At MDL Technology, we’re working around the clock to provide quality disaster recovery solutions for our customers. Learn more about our disaster recovery services here.
