Don’t wait for a crisis: why regular disaster-recovery drills matter

Imagine it’s Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year for your business, a large retailer known for incredible deals and a vast selection of products. The stores are bustling, and online orders are pouring in. Everything is going smoothly, with sales figures already surpassing last year’s records.

Then the unthinkable happens. A massive storm hits the region where your primary data center is located, causing power fluctuations. The backup generators kick in, but the data center goes offline. Panic ensues as your website becomes unresponsive and your employees and customers are locked out of the system.

The store managers try to keep the physical sales going, but your online platform contributes significantly to your revenue – especially on Black Friday. The customers’ frustration mounts as they can’t access deals or complete their purchases. Social media starts buzzing with complaints and negative reviews, quickly escalating the situation.

Thankfully, you anticipated such a scenario and developed a comprehensive disaster-recovery plan specifically for your cloud systems. So, your IT team soon initiates a failover to a secondary cloud infrastructure that is geographically distant from the storm-affected area.

As your systems come back online, the website is restored and transactions resume. While the IT team monitors your systems closely, customer-service reps reassure customers and resolve any issues caused by the downtime. You not only salvaged the sales of the day but also protected your reputation.

This scenario shows how important it is to have effective disaster-recovery plans in place for cloud systems, whether you’re a retailer or doing business in another industry. Apart from preventing data loss, it’s about ensuring business continuity so you can keep operating or quickly resume operations after a disaster.

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What is a disaster-recovery drill?

The easiest way to plan your disaster-recovery strategy is to work with an experienced cloud service provider who will be able to recommend an approach tailor-made for your organization.

For example, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) provides robust disaster-recovery capabilities – including disaster-recovery drill functionality, a key feature that lets you test your recovery plans without affecting your production workloads

A disaster-recovery drill is a simulated event designed to test the effectiveness of your recovery plan. It allows you to validate your organization’s disaster-recovery procedures, identify potential issues and meet your recovery objectives.

Conducting regular drills is therefore essential for maintaining a reliable disaster-recovery strategy.

How OCI supports disaster-recovery drills

• Non-disruptive testing: These drills can be performed without affecting your production environment. So, you can validate your disaster-recovery plans without risking downtime or data loss.
• Automated orchestration: OCI provides automated orchestration for these drills, making it easier to test recovery procedures. This level of automation reduces the potential for human error and ensures consistent execution of drills.
• Comprehensive testing: The drill functionality supports comprehensive testing of components that include computing, storage, networking and database services. This holistic approach covers all aspects of your infrastructure.
• Customizable scenarios: You can create customized disaster-recovery scenarios that mimic potential disasters. This flexibility allows for more realistic testing and better preparedness for different types of disasters.
• Detailed reporting: After a drill, OCI provides detailed reports that outline the success of the drill, any issues encountered and recommendations for improvement. These reports are valuable for continual improvement of your disaster-recovery plans.

Steps to perform a disaster-recovery drill

So, how should you proceed when you want to schedule a drill for your organization? Again, a cloud service provider will help you fine-tune the plan, but it typically involves the following steps:

1. Plan the drill: Define the objectives, scope and disaster scenarios. Identify the resources and personnel involved in the drill.
2. Prepare the environment: Configure the disaster-recovery environment correctly. This includes setting up replication, backup and failover mechanisms.
3. Execute the drill: Use OCI’s automated tools to initiate the drill. Monitor the process to ensure that it’s going as planned.
4. Validate the recovery: Once the drill has been completed, validate that all services and data have been recovered as expected. Test the functionality of recovered systems to check they are operating correctly.
5. Analyze and report: Review the results of the drill, identify any issues and document the findings. Generate a report that includes recommendations for improving your disaster-recovery plan.

Make disaster preparedness a way of corporate life

Keep in mind, you’ll need to conduct drills regularly. It’s the only way to always be ready for unforeseen events. Determining the frequency of these drills should include evaluating the criticality of your systems and how often your infrastructure is updated. Then analyze the results of the drills to keep improving your disaster-recovery plans.

In between, you should document your disaster-recovery procedures in detail and keep them updated. This documentation should be easily accessible should a real disaster occur.

Also train all relevant employees on disaster-recovery procedures so they know what role they will play during a drill – and, of course, during an actual disaster. Regular training will also improve their response times.

If all this sounds complicated or overwhelming, keep in mind that a cloud service provider can take on much of the responsibility, especially when using tools like OCI’s disaster-recovery drill functionality to make your business as resilient as possible.