Question 1

What is disaster recovery testing exactly?

Accepted Answer

Disaster recovery testing is the process of verifying, through a scripted exercise, that documented recovery procedures actually restore critical systems within their defined recovery objectives. It ranges from discussion-based tabletop exercises to full-scale simulations, and TechTarget defines it as an examination of each step in a recovery plan to confirm data and system restoration.

Question 2

How often should disaster recovery tests be conducted?

Accepted Answer

Frequency depends on service criticality and rate of change. Guidance associated with NIST SP 800-84 points to annual testing for most contingency plans, with quarterly or monthly testing warranted for highly critical or rapidly changing services.

Question 3

What is the difference between RTO and RPO in testing?

Accepted Answer

Recovery time objective (RTO) measures how long a system can be unavailable before the outage becomes unacceptable, while recovery point objective (RPO) measures how much data loss, measured in time, is tolerable. A disaster recovery test measures actual performance against both targets to confirm whether the documented plan meets them.

Question 4

What should a disaster recovery test report include?

Accepted Answer

An effective report documents each finding, its operational impact, the responsible owner, a priority level, and a remediation deadline. CISA's after-action findings illustrate this structure, tying specific gaps, such as SLA misunderstandings, to concrete follow-up recommendations.

Question 5

Can PROJECT-JTH help run or prepare for a disaster recovery test?

Accepted Answer

PROJECT-JTH offers a Technical Systems & Risk Review and Infrastructure Automation & Ansible Review to assess recovery runbooks and infrastructure readiness before a test, alongside leadership workshops to rehearse decision-making during the exercise itself. Project Relay then tracks the resulting artifacts and action items through remediation.

IT Leaders: Run a Tabletop This Quarter for Disaster Recovery Testing

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