The idea behind disaster recovery planning (DPR) is to process a plan that will help the IT department to recover data and system functionality to allow an organization to operate even at a minimal level. According to an online survey by Disaster Recovery Preparedness Benchmark, three out of four companies worldwide never test DPR. Companies cited reasons as the inadequacy of time and resources and not having DPR as their priority. The lack of DPR leads to service outage in many organizations.

The possibility of having service outage in the larger organizations: According to the survey from Spiceworks, in the last one year 77 percent of organizations experienced at least one outage. Larger companies those rely on a vast number of services, tend to experience more outages than the smaller companies. Larger companies are prone to get affected by outages because of having more moving parts.

Reasons of frequent service outages: The chief reasons behind service outages are power outages, internet connectivity issue, and hardware failure because there is a limited number of organizations which have backup power sources or superfluous internet service providers. There are also some outages due to organizations’ issues with a third-party vendor or human error or sometimes natural disasters.

During the process of testing, a company’s weaknesses are exposed and the company needs changes in the processes to improve the vulnerabilities and to be ready to face the outage if it happens.

Hot Sites: Hot sites offer a valuable backup system to any organizations that want to resume work during a disaster. A hot site has all the necessary equipment to run regular activities for a business operation for a span of time but in other location. Hot sites are operated by another company. Hot sites also provide data backup services and it saves additional time because data does not have to be located and loaded onto hot site computers. 

It is necessary for the organizations to develop its DRP and test it, train personnel and document it in a proper way before any disaster takes place. Organizations also can hire specialized disaster recovery planning consultant to assist during the testing plan.