Many businesses now depend on cloud-hosted virtual disaster recovery solutions to safeguard their operations. While these tools provide strong protection, simply having them in place isn’t enough. An untested recovery plan is unpredictable and, therefore, unreliable.
A virtual disaster recovery drill allows you to safely test your plan, identify weaknesses, and build confidence in your ability to recover. In this guide, we’ll explain what a virtual drill is, why it’s vital for business resilience, and how to carry one out effectively.
What is a virtual disaster recovery drill?
A virtual disaster recovery drill is a practice run of your cloud-based recovery solution. During the exercise, your team runs through a simulated disruption to test whether your recovery platform can restore applications, data, and workflows as expected. At the same time, it lets you examine how your employees communicate, make decisions, and perform their responsibilities during an incident.
Why your business needs to run virtual disaster recovery drills
Conducting regular virtual disaster recovery drills enables your business to:
- Reduce financial risk: The cost of downtime and data loss far outweighs the expense of a drill. According to a 2024 Oxford Economics study, Global 2000 companies lost an average of $200 million annually each due to downtime.
- Eliminate uncertainty: A plan on paper is built on assumptions. Drills replace those assumptions with facts, proving whether you can meet your critical recovery objectives.
- Meet compliance and insurance requirements: Many industries have regulatory mandates that require regular, documented testing of recovery plans, such as HIPAA for healthcare. Furthermore, cyber insurance providers increasingly demand proof of preparedness before issuing or renewing policies.
- Build stakeholder confidence: A proven recovery plan gives leadership, employees, and customers peace of mind. It demonstrates that the business is resilient and prepared to handle disruptions.
Key steps to running a virtual disaster recovery drill
Follow these six steps to understand exactly how well your virtual disaster recovery plan can perform.
1. Define objectives
Start by deciding exactly what you want the drill to prove. For instance, can your recovery platform bring the customer database back online within two hours? Will employees still be able to log in and work if the office network is unavailable? Setting clear, specific goals makes it much easier to measure success.
To make these objectives more concrete, include benchmarks such as:
- Recovery time objective (RTO): How quickly systems need to be restored after a disruption
- Recovery point objective (RPO): How much data your business could reasonably lose without experiencing severe impact
2. Assemble the right team
Disaster recovery involves the whole business, not just the IT department. Therefore, make sure to include the following in the drill:
- IT staff to handle the technical recovery steps
- Operations managers who rely on the systems every day
- Leadership to make key business decisions under pressure
- Communications staff to keep employees, customers, and partners informed
Assign each person a clear role to avoid confusion during the drill. When everyone knows their responsibilities, the test runs more smoothly and produces more reliable results.
3. Simulate a scenario
Choose a realistic scenario your business could face. The scenario should directly challenge the objectives you defined in step 1.
For example:
Objective: Prove the recovery tools and plan can restore the accounting system in under two hours (RTO).
Scenario: Simulate a ransomware attack that encrypts the accounting server.
Drill: The team now has to recover the system under the conditions set by the scenario, which directly shows if the objective is met.
4. Run the drill in a virtual environment
The scenario is executed in an isolated sandbox environment that mirrors your live systems but is completely separate from them. By using isolated environments, your team can safely simulate a full system recovery without touching your live operational network.
5. Evaluate and document results
During the drill, assign an observer to record all actions, timings, and outcomes. Their job is to note both strengths and weaknesses by answering the following questions:
- Did the recovery steps take longer than expected?
- Were there communication gaps between departments?
- Did the technology perform as intended?
After the drill, turn these observations into a clear, concise report for leadership and stakeholders. Highlight where the recovery tools and team performed well, and where improvements are needed.
6. Update your recovery plan
The true value of a virtual disaster recovery drill comes from the actions you take afterward. Use the findings from your report to make tangible improvements, such as updating disaster recovery procedures, adjusting technical configurations, or providing additional employee training. Finally, schedule the next drill to test the new improvements and keep the cycle of preparedness going.
How often should you conduct a virtual disaster recovery drill?
For most organizations, running a virtual disaster recovery drill once or twice a year is enough to keep the plan aligned with changes in technology, staff, and business processes.
Organizations with strict compliance obligations or high availability requirements, such as healthcare and eCommerce retail, may need quarterly tests. What matters most is consistency. Each drill reinforces preparedness and ensures your recovery platform and your team remain ready. Liberty Center One includes Data Protection with Disaster Recovery as a standard feature of it cloud engagements. This includes 30 days of immutable back-ups and DR with a 4 hour RPO and includes the management of an annual disaster recovery drill.
For expert guidance on virtual disaster recovery or help planning your next drill, contact Liberty Center One today.