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Having a disaster recovery plan is only the beginning.

So you have read up all about data loss, logical and natural disaster, data security, storage modes, backup strategies and have even come up with a disaster recovery plan that fits the business model of your enterprise. You can certainly pat yourself on your back for having thought about one of the important aspect of information security in the modern day enterprises where loss of critical data can very well spell doom for the company.

BUT, know that merely having a disaster recovery plan does not make things as safe as you actually would like them to be. Consider it to be only a tentative positive step in the right direction but something that is far from solving the real concerns regarding potential threats to data security.

Failing disaster recovery plans are not a rarity

The reason for saying, a disaster recovery plan is not the end of the story is that there have been several instances of high profile companies suffering from irrecoverable data loss despite having an apparently fool-proof disaster recovery plan in place. The reason: the officials concerned were contend with the existence of a plan and never bothered to have a trial run of their disaster recovery plan to see if it really stands up to the test of reality check.

The data security officials need to ascertain that what is envisaged in theory would actually work out in practice in a simulated disaster situation.

To say the least, testing a disaster recovery plan is as much or even more important than simply formulating a disaster recovery plan and leaving it at that. There are several aspects that can go wrong in an actual disaster situation, several unforeseen factors that could crop up rendering the whole plan useless or inadequate beyond imagination.

To avoid such a tragic failure of the disaster recovery plan, everyone involved in the business of securing critical data should realize the urgent need to test run the plans and ensure that they work like we want it to be in the time of crisis. If this is not done, then we run the obvious risk of a possibly failed disaster recovery plan which would mean that all the money and man hours spent on formulating such a plan is a dead loss. Mind you, such a dead loss is over and above the possible loss of critical data which could well mean the end of company.

So how do you test a disaster recovery plan?

On a system that closely resembles the actual environment where the critical data is stored, simulate all the typical situations that can be called a disaster.

A disaster need not always be a fire or a flood. It can also be an unexpected hard disk failure or a power failure or even a hard disk failure or an unexpected partition damage, or a virus attack. Needless to say during the trial run of the plan, you would come across several circumstances that you forgot to account for while formulating the plan. Make careful note of all such factors and reformulate the plan with due consideration for the new factors.

Lison Joseph is a contributor at Free-backup.info -- the home of the popular Amazon S3 based online backup service -- Back2zip. This article available at http://free-backup.info/test-the-disaster-recovery-plan.html