If you woke up tomorrow and ran a marathon, how would you fare? It's highly doubtful that you would successfully run the 26.2 miles without months of training, drills and exercises.
The same is true for disaster recovery (DR): The chance that you could successfully recover IT operations without having exercised your DR plans on a regular basis is slim at best. The chance that you could successfully recover and meet your recovery objectives is zero. Yet Forrester finds that exercising DR plans is one area in which many organizations continue to fall short.
Although most enterprises claim they conduct a full exercise of their DR plans at least once per year, anecdotal evidence suggests that the majority of these exercises are not comprehensive and thorough; enterprises often just exercise a portion of the plan or a subset of applications.
