A financial services company needs to validate its disaster recovery (DR) plan for a critical, customer-facing application. The primary goal of the test is to verify the entire failover process, including data replication and service restoration at the DR site, but without affecting the live production environment or causing any user downtime. Which DR testing method BEST meets these requirements?
The correct answer is a simulated failover. This method tests the disaster recovery process in an isolated environment (often called a sandbox or bubble network) without impacting the production systems. It allows administrators to validate the technical procedures of failing over services, such as starting virtual machines, restoring data, and verifying application functionality at the recovery site.
A live failover is incorrect because it involves actually switching production traffic to the disaster recovery site, which would cause an outage and violate the requirement of not affecting the live environment.
A tabletop exercise is a discussion-based activity where team members walk through the DR plan verbally; it does not involve any actual technical failover of systems.
Backup validation confirms that backup data is not corrupt and can be restored, but it does not test the entire disaster recovery process of failing over an application or service to a different site.