Ensuring Your Disaster Recovery Solutions Deliver: Testing Best Practices

Every minute your systems are down, money slips away. Customer trust erodes and operations grind to a halt. It’s a scenario every business leader fears, yet surprisingly, most are unprepared for it. Fewer than one in three companies regularly test their recovery plans. That means a vast majority are running on hope, not certainty. 

Having a disaster recovery plan tucked away in a binder or a digital folder isn’t enough. To ensure your disaster recovery solutions perform when it matters most, you need a rigorous, realistic, and repeatable testing process. It’s the difference between having a map and knowing how to navigate the terrain in a storm.  

This article walks through proven best practices, lessons learned, and how OTAVA helps organizations turn paper-based strategies into genuine operational resilience. 

Why Testing Your Disaster Recovery Solutions Is Non-Negotiable

Testing can feel like a disruption. It takes time, resources, and can be a bit intimidating. But skipping it is like buying a fire extinguisher and never checking its pressure gauge. You assume it will work, but you have no real proof. 

Testing is the only way to verify if your recovery plan can meet your defined Recovery Time (RTO) and Recovery Point (RPO) targets. It’s one thing to say you can be back online in four hours; it’s another to make it happen under pressure. 

Without testing, you’re guaranteed to have hidden gaps. An outdated contact list means the right people don’t get the alert. An untested failover process might stall halfway through. A missing software dependency could leave a critical application dead in the water.  

The threat landscape makes this non-negotiable. For instance, the latest Verizon Data Breach Report noted that while the median ransomware payment dropped, a significant 64% of victims refused to pay. This trend reinforces the need for tested disaster recovery solutions that enable a full recovery without considering a ransom payment.  

The common threats are varied and relentless: 

• Ransomware: Still a top cause of breaches. 

• Human Element: Simple errors and sophisticated social engineering together cause a massive percentage of incidents. 

• Stolen Credentials: A primary attack vector for bad actors. 

• Good Old-Fashioned Failure: Hardware dies, cloud services experience outages, and natural disasters still happen. 

At OTAVA, we’ve baked testing right into our S.E.C.U.R.E.™ Framework. The “Recover” and “Undo” components operationalize your recovery strategies and include automated testing to ensure everything works as intended. 

Test Across Multiple Scenarios

The world of IT failures isn’t one-dimensional. A test that only simulates a server crash won’t prepare you for a sophisticated cyberattack. Your testing needs to be as diverse as the threats you face. 

A robust testing regimen should cover a wide range of failure modes: 

• Cyberattacks: Simulate a ransomware encryption event or a malicious data breach. 

• Accidental Deletion: What happens if a critical database is mistakenly wiped? 

• Equipment Failure: Test the failure of a core switch, storage array, or server. 

• Environmental Disasters: Plan for a total loss of a primary data center. 

• Loss of Key Personnel: Ensure more than one person knows how to initiate recovery procedures. 

Major cloud providers like Microsoft Azure advocate for this approach, recommending regular “drills” that simulate outages to validate application integrity after a recovery event. 

The beauty of modern disaster recovery solutions is their flexibility. For example, OTAVA’s DRaaS solutions offer tiered RTO and RPO options. This allows you to design scenario testing that matches your actual workload priorities.  

Make Testing Regular, Realistic, and Relevant

An annual test that everyone knows about months in advance isn’t much of a test. It’s a scripted performance. Real disasters don’t send a calendar invite. 

The best practice is to blend different types of tests: 

• Regular Drills: Run smaller, more frequent tabletop exercises or component failovers throughout the year. This keeps the procedures fresh in everyone’s mind. 

• Comprehensive Tests: Conduct at least one or two full-scale, organization-wide tests annually. This is your fire drill. 

• Unscheduled Tests: Surprise your team (or at least a subset of it) with an unannounced test. 

Furthermore, your tests must account for how we work today. Can your team access the recovery environments and communicate effectively if they’re all working remotely? Testing hybrid and remote work recovery is essential. 

Define Success With Measurable Metrics

Set targets before you test. Tie every exercise to two numbers and treat them as pass/fail rules: 

• RTO (Recovery Time Objective): How quickly systems must be restored. 

• RPO (Recovery Point Objective): How much data you can afford to lose. 

Write them per application (e.g., payroll RTO 2 hours, RPO 15 minutes) and record actual results after each run. Track variance: Where did you beat the target, where did you miss, and why? Trend the data across quarters to show whether teams are getting faster and whether data loss is shrinking.  

Roll the findings into runbooks and retest. Clear metrics turn disaster recovery solutions from hopeful plans into accountable performance and give leadership credible evidence for investment.  

Document, Review, and Adapt Your Testing Process

A test isn’t over when the systems are back online. It’s over when the lessons are learned and incorporated. Every single test, big or small, must be thoroughly documented:  

• What were the objectives?  

• What was the scope?  

• What went right?  

• What went wrong?  

• What are the recommendations for improvement? 

This post-test evaluation is your mechanism for continuous improvement. Use it to update your DR plan immediately. Infrastructure changes, new applications are deployed, and regulatory requirements evolve. Your DR plan is a living document, not a binder that gathers dust on a shelf. 

For us at OTAVA, this documentation is also about compliance. Our recovery testing processes are fully documented, providing clear, audit-ready records for major frameworks like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and ISO 27001. 

Avoid Common Disaster Recovery Testing Pitfalls

Many DR tests are set up to succeed, not to truly challenge. This creates dangerous blind spots. The biggest pitfall is running an overly scripted drill that never captures the chaos of a real crisis. If your team knows exactly what’s coming, you’re not testing but rehearsing a play. 

Another classic mistake is only testing technology. If your plan doesn’t include communication chaos, decision-making under pressure, and the coordination of a potentially remote team, it’s incomplete. Assuming everyone will be in the office to huddle around a single screen is an outdated fantasy. 

A genuine test pressures the entire recovery ecosystem, not just the servers. That’s why our approach focuses on guided, end-to-end testing that involves your technical and operational teams, ensuring your plan works for how you work. 

Leverage the Right Technology and Expertise

Use tech that removes friction from testing. The strongest disaster recovery solutions pair automated failover, immutable backups, and elastic cloud capacity with orchestration you can rehearse on demand, no twin data center required.  

OTAVA’s DRaaS stacks Zerto, VMware, and Veeam to stream changes continuously and spin up clean replicas for drills or real events. Runbooks execute in order, API checks confirm app health, and evidence logs satisfy HIPAA/PCI/ISO audits.  

Put Your Disaster Recovery Solutions to the Test With OTAVA

In today’s threat landscape, an untested recovery plan is a liability. It’s a promise you’re not sure you can keep. Regular, realistic, and measurable testing is the only way to transform your plan from a document into a guaranteed capability. 

We’ve built our approach around this principle. With OTAVA, you get tiered recovery options to match your business needs, the strategic guidance of our S.E.C.U.R.E.™ Framework, automated testing to simplify the process, and compliance-ready documentation to prove your readiness. 

Don’t wait for a crisis to discover if your plan works. Contact OTAVA today to schedule a consultation and start building real, demonstrable confidence in your ability to recover anything, at any time.