Effective IT disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity planning is essential for every business. All businesses depend on their IT services for moment-to-moment operations. So they must all take measures to ensure that those services are not disrupted due to a natural or man-made disaster.

However, because IT environments have become so complex - and because IT budgets are stretched so thinly - IT organizations face real challenges as they attempt to safeguard the business against such disasters. These challenges include:

• Ensuring that planned DR measures will actually meet the needs of the business if and when they are called upon
• Determining exactly when such measures should, in fact, be activated
• Documenting to senior management, auditors, insurers, and/or regulators that best efforts have been made to protect the business from a full range of potentially disruptive eventualities

All of these challenges can be addressed by pre-testing DR plans in a simulated network environment. By performing these simulations, DR planners can cost-effectively assess the end-to-end performance of critical applications under any projected condition. Equipped with this insight, DR planners can make more informed decisions about how to best ensure business continuity - and can fully justify those decisions to any appropriate third parties.