Practise Restoring Your Systems

As with any BC plan, practise restoring your IT recovery plans. Imagine how devastated you’d feel if, having backed up all your data from the start and created an IT continuity plan, your business suffered from a serious incident and you found that your backup files were corrupt. You need to be able to reload applications and get systems back up and running, all within the timescales you previously identified.

Practice provides valuable insight into the potential problem areas of a restore plan and increases recovery awareness among your staff. Without regular testing you can’t understand realistic timeframes or become familiar with the recovery processes that can make such a difference to the extent to which you’re able to salvage your system. We discuss testing and carrying out exercises in Chapter 11.