The company I’m contracted to did a Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery test recently. We were called the day before and told the building would be closed, and what we had to work from remote locations (read as home). The problem is, it was not an accurate test.

Out of the 5 of us that are mission critical, on my team, 2 of us don’t have company laptops. So we got stuck with having to RDP in to our desktops after we connect to the VPN system. The problem was, if something major had happened to the building, more than likely power would be out (I can only think of water main breaks or snow days that would close the building and not effect power).

It doesn’t seem like a good test in my opinion, since if my desktop at work wasn’t up, all I could do would be web based email and web based meetings. I wouldn’t be able to use the IM client. I wouldn’t be able to access any of the department sites I need. I wouldn’t be able to preform the majority of my duties. As it was, during the test, I didn’t have my work notebook, which had my notes for the documentation stuff I needed to do (which really is all I had planned for the day of the test.

If a company going to do a test like this, to make sure the company can keep running in case of a “disaster” they need to make sure all the mission critical people have the tools they need. While it’s good to test things like the employee vpn for capacity (especially if it is in a remote data center), having email, voice mail, web based meeting tools can only carry a company so far in to a continuity plan. Yes, the business can still take the orders, but they need the tools to fulfill those orders too.