How Often Should Enterprises Test Mainframe Disaster Recovery?
A mainframe disaster recovery plan is only as good as the last time someone actually tried to use it. That's the uncomfortable truth behind most DR failures. Enterprises spend heavily on redundant infrastructure, backup platforms, and thick recovery runbooks, then treat testing as a once-a-year compliance checkbox. When a real outage hits, whether it's a storage array failure, a ransomware attack on the backup repository, or a botched firmware update, the plan on paper rarely matches the environment on the ground. Mainframe disaster recovery testing is what closes that gap. It's the difference between believing you can recover and knowing you can, under time pressure, with the people and tools you'll actually have on hand. Why Annual Testing Stopped Being Enough A once-a-year DR test made sense when mainframe environments changed slowly. That's no longer the environment most enterprises run. z/OS shops today are layering in hybrid cloud connectivity, expa...