In regulated industries, where software underpins critical processes like medical care, banking transactions, and energy infrastructure, downtime is simply not an option.
But what happens when disaster does strike? In these regulatory sectors, where flawless service is not just a goal but a contractual obligation outlined in Service Level Agreements (SLAs), preparation is key.
This is where disaster recovery planning steps in.
For professionals in these fields, maintaining consistent uptime is about honoring commitments made to customers and stakeholders within defined SLAs. The pressure to deliver is immense.
So, how do you prepare for the unexpected? Disaster recovery planning is the solution. It’s about being proactive and ensuring business continuity even in adversity. By integrating SLAs and disaster recovery plans, organizations not only mitigate risk but also uphold their commitments.
Understanding the regulatory landscape
Following strict regulatory requirements is not just a choice but a legal obligation in regulated industries. These industries work within complex regulations set to safeguard data integrity, ensure consumer protection, and maintain the stability of critical systems and services.
Although these regulatory requirements vary across industries, they all share a common goal: To ensure compliance with laws and standards.
Here are some examples:
Healthcare
The healthcare sector operates under regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which mandates stringent requirements for protecting patient data and ensuring its confidentiality and integrity.
Finance
In the financial industry, regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) impose strict requirements for financial reporting and internal controls to prevent fraudulent activities and ensure transparency and accountability.
Energy
The energy sector is subject to regulations governing environmental protection, safety standards, and infrastructure reliability to mitigate risks and ensure the stability of the energy supply.
Concerning nuclear power, regulatory bodies enforce rigorous standards to safeguard against accidents and ensure public safety, highlighting the critical nature of compliance and adherence to regulations in this sector.
Aligning disaster recovery plans with regulatory mandates
Given the critical importance of regulatory compliance, disaster recovery plans must align closely with regulatory mandates. This alignment ensures that organizations meet legal requirements in the event of a disaster while minimizing risks and protecting sensitive data.
For instance, disaster recovery plans in healthcare organizations must incorporate provisions for protecting patient data under HIPAA regulations. These measures can include data encryption, regular data backups, and secure access controls to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of electronic protected health information (ePHI).
Similarly, financial institutions have to ensure that their disaster recovery plans adhere to SOX requirements for maintaining accurate financial records and internal controls. This can entail implementing robust backup and recovery procedures, conducting regular audits of financial systems, and documenting all transactions to ensure compliance with SOX regulations.
By aligning disaster recovery plans with regulatory mandates, organizations can mitigate risks, ensure business continuity, and ultimately, maintain the trust and confidence of stakeholders.
How to create a comprehensive disaster recovery plan
Creating a disaster recovery plan requires human insight and strategic thinking, so it can’t be automated. To assemble a comprehensive plan, you need to consider these three key steps—and be sure to engage in efficient team collaboration.
Step 1. Identify potential risks
Conduct a thorough assessment of potential risks and vulnerabilities that could disrupt operations.
Here are potential risks that organizations could consider when creating a disaster recovery plan:
- Cloud computing resource outages (availability zones, etc.)
- Cyberattacks (ransomware, etc.)
- On-premise hardware failures (disk failures, etc.)
- Database corruption/data loss
- Operating system or Virtual machine failures
By identifying these risks, organizations can prioritize their mitigation efforts and tailor their recovery plans to address specific threats.
Step 2. Establish recovery objectives
Once the risks are identified, establish recovery objectives. These objectives should outline the desired outcomes of the recovery process. Common outcomes can include, minimizing downtime, preserving data integrity, and/or ensuring regulatory compliance. These recovery objectives provide a roadmap for guiding recovery efforts and measuring their effectiveness.
Step 3. Define recovery procedures
When you have your risks identified and recovery objectives established, the next step is to define your recovery procedures. This step involves mapping out instructions for responding to different disaster scenarios, including who is responsible for each task, what tools and resources are needed, and how progress will be monitored and evaluated. For this step, the best rule of thumb is to ensure that your team has set up c and comprehensive recovery procedures. This is to ensure a swift and coordinated response during times of crisis.
Make it a collaborative effort
Disaster recovery planning is a collaborative effort that includes software development, cloud engineering, site reliability engineering, and QA team members. Together, they assess potential risks and vulnerabilities, establish recovery objectives, and define recovery procedures. Collaboration of this extent is important as it ensures that the plan is comprehensive and aligned with organizational goals.
Keep it simple yet effective
A disaster recovery plan doesn’t have to be complex. In fact, simplicity often leads to better understanding and implementation. It can be as straightforward as a flowchart that outlines the sequence of actions to be taken in response to different disaster scenarios—in other words, if X happens, we do Y and validate it using Z.
For example, if data is accidentally wiped out, the plan should detail the process for restoring it from backup and validating its integrity.
Plan for failovers
In addition to recovery procedures, it’s essential to plan for failovers. Failover mechanisms ensure seamless continuity of services by automatically transferring data and operations to backup systems in the event of an outage.
For example, if an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instance in an eastern-hosted availability zone has an outage, failover infrastructure across multiple availability zones will “failover” to minimize downtime. See more details specific to multiple availability zone failover on the AWS documentation for RDS.
Having failover mechanisms in place minimizes downtime and ensures uninterrupted service for customers. An effective disaster recovery plan addresses a wide range of potential disasters, from internal data corruption/loss to cyberattacks. By identifying various potential disaster scenarios and mapping out response strategies for each, organizations can be better prepared to mitigate risks and minimize the impact of disruptions.
Testing a disaster recovery plan
Testing a disaster recovery plan is not a one-time task; it’s an ongoing necessity to ensure its reliability when a crisis strikes.
Disaster recovery plans should be seen as living documents that require regular validation rather than static strategies that you ‘set and forget’. The collaboration between software development, cloud engineering, site reliability engineering, and QA is essential not only during the planning stage but also in the regular validation process. Typically, this validation occurs quarterly to maintain alignment with compliance frameworks and evolving threats.
Unlike automated processes, this validation requires manual review and validation by QA and SRE teams to ensure functionality, reliability, and relevance to current system states and threats.
Leveraging a test management platform like TestRail can streamline these efforts, allowing teams to document step-by-step instructions, monitor executions, and manage version history.
Test plan feature: Utilize TestRail’s test plan feature to create structured test plans for testing disaster recovery procedures. This includes defining test cases, assigning responsibilities, and setting timelines for testing activities.
Reporting capabilities: Leverage TestRail’s reporting capabilities to generate detailed insights into testing progress, outcomes, and areas requiring further attention. Learn more about the various TestRail reporting use cases.
Thorough planning, validation, and maintenance help reveal weaknesses and gaps as well as strengthen an organization’s disaster response and recovery capabilities.
Interested in learning more about how to test in regulated industries? Watch this webinar on the TestRail Youtube channel as TestRail’s Solution Architect and disaster recovery subject matter expert, Chris Faraglia, guides you through the unique challenges and characteristics of software testing in industries such as finance, energy, and healthcare.
