Recovery testing your entire estate can help improve your business’s resiliency, save time and resources and help you meet your audit and compliance targets. Read here the why, what and how of recovery testing.
Why should you do recovery tests?
Regularly testing the recovery of your backups is crucial for three reasons; firstly, to identify any issues in advance, secondly to resolve them and finally to build confidence in your backups so that when you do need them for real, you can recover them quickly and efficiently to meet your RPOs and RTOs.
The worst time to discover an issue with your backups or recovery process is when you’re in the middle of a real-world disaster, relying on them most to get your business back up and running. Any problems that crop up during a disaster might not just delay your recovery – it might make your systems entirely unrecoverable.
Regularly testing your servers manually is a time-consuming job though, especially if you want to test across your whole data centre. This is why Cristie software includes automated recovery testing functionality for all our BMR and system recovery customers as part of their licences.
Recovery testing using automation
Cristie’s recovery testing uses automation to save you time and management overhead on your testing jobs, while giving you the tools to test every server in your data centre. The automation runs either scheduled or instant sand-boxed recovery tests directly into the cloud or to a hypervisor.
These schedules can be set months in advance and can be set either as a one-off or on an automated, recurring basis. Also you’re free to create as many schedules with as many different machines in each schedule. Automating the process frees up the time required to both set up and run the individual tests, as well as the management needed to keep on top of your testing schedule.
Manual v automated recovery testing
Thinking about doing manual testing? We say – think carefully. Often, manual testing means that you can only effectively test your most critical systems.
Using third party software? We’ve spoken to a lot of customers that have used third-party software to run their tests. Sometimes only a sample of the systems are tested – and sometimes that sample can be as low as 10-20%. This sample is then used to build a generalised picture of your backup health, which doesn’t necessarily reflect the reality.
When you use Cristie to do your recovery testing, the process is automated and scheduled. It’s enabled our customers to test the entirety of their server estates and be confident that they can recover any of their systems after a disaster.
Detailed emailed reporting to meet compliance targets
In addition to building backup confidence internally, Cristie’s Recovery Testing can also help you meet your governmental or industry based auditory and compliance measures.
All of our automated recovery tests can be followed up with detailed email reporting on successes, failures, time taken and any problems encountered to give you a full record of your test results.
In addition to the reports, we can also follow up the tests with further configurations, such as deleting successful tests to free up disk space and leaving failed recoveries in place while you investigate why the recovery failed.
We hope this has given you an insight into the importance of recovery testing and how Cristie can help you meet your testing needs and audit requirements. To find out more about Cristie BMR software, click here. To book a free trial of any of our software products, click here.
