Question of the Month: How often do you think your DR plan should be tested?

"Once a year, to make sure all involved personnel are up to speed with the procedures in place."
--Ginny Galletta, IT systems engineer III, Kronos Inc., Chelmsford, MA

"Your DR plan is only as good as the last time you performed it. In a rapidly changing critical services environment where services and administration change daily, then a DR testing plan should be the same, tested daily or weekly. On the other hand, if testing a plan means you have to take applications down in order to fail over, then either updating your DR environment to alleviate this or testing less frequently would probably be considered."
--Mark T. Petersen, enterprise storage team lead, University of Iowa Healthcare, Iowa City, IA

"I expect a test completed quarterly; yearly, we do a complete application test."
--Paul Roth, backup/restore systems specialist, OhioHealth, Columbus, OH