What are the first steps in preparing for a DR test?
I would say that once you’ve got your plan together, set your goals and objectives. What are we trying to test and what are we trying to demonstrate? So, we need to put together a disaster scenario as part of the planning around the test. What will be our situation? What do we want to test for and be ready for? Don’t do ad hoc testing. You want something to be structured and something to follow along with. This really gives us the opportunity to measure our success. If you don’t have a predefined testing schedule, it’s very difficult to measure what your success will be. And, of course, we need to establish what the success criteria is and what institutes a successful test. What can you do to ensure “cheating” doesn’t occur during a DR test? My first advice would be to keep the test as close as possible to a real situation. A lot of times when a DR test is to take place, you see some folks starting to plan for the test –having things ready, trying to reconfigure the test environments,
