A financial services company needs to conduct a disaster recovery test that provides the highest possible assurance that its recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) can be met in a real-world outage. The executive team has approved a planned, short-term service interruption for the test. Which disaster recovery testing method should the systems administrator implement to meet this requirement?
The correct answer is a live failover. This method involves switching the actual production workload to the disaster recovery site, making it the most comprehensive and realistic test of a disaster recovery plan. It is the best way to validate that the organization can meet its RTO and RPO targets during an actual emergency.
A tabletop exercise is only a discussion-based walkthrough of the plan and involves no real system changes. A simulated failover activates the DR environment but does not switch over the live production workload, so it does not fully test the cutover process. Cold site activation is the process of provisioning a DR site from scratch and is not a specific testing method for validating the failover of an existing, running environment.