When was the last disaster test? How much did it cost and can we really trust our plans now? An contingency plan with guaranteed quality and an SLA would be much better than testing something once a year with a lot of manual effort that might not even work in the event of a major crisis.

What would a quality guarantee or SLA for contingency plans look like? Especially in the context of today's IT landscapes with a typical mix of on-prem and SaaS applications and in view of the lessons learnt from the pandemic, a contingency plan ‘on paper’ is no longer sufficient. Which time-consuming activities can be shifted to the preparation phase and thus developed in a test-driven manner so that the desaster exercise runs automatically every Monday as an integration test at best?

What guarantees for emergencies does the company need in order to fulfil its requirements? How do you take a holistic view from the user to the communication structure and from the desktop and server hardware to the applications? How can you set up an affordable ‘hot standby’ system for office communication and the most important business applications so that the company can continue to function with the most important topics and communicate and work at all in the event of ransomware?

We present the concept of a ‘No Restore Solution’ as a solution and show practical examples of test-driven development for emergency preparedness.

How not to restore anything in an emergency. Because restoring takes a lot of time and may not work when it really matters. Instead, prepared system images that already contain up-to-date data are switched on and used. Thanks to virtualisation, cloud and SaaS solutions, such concepts can now be implemented very cost-effectively and with high quality.