Project Management  

Automated Business Continuity Testing Framework

1. Introduction

Business continuity depends on the ability of systems to withstand failures, outages, data corruption, or unexpected loads. Continuity testing includes failover validation, restoration checks, and actual recovery simulations. Manual DR drills are unreliable and often skipped. A fully automated Business Continuity Testing Framework solves this gap.

This article describes a full framework for continuous verification of business continuity using automated scripts, cloud-native workflows, and .NET-based orchestrators.

2. Goals

  • Automate DR testing monthly or weekly

  • Validate RPO/RTO metrics

  • Simulate real outages

  • Run synthetic transactions

  • Generate proof reports for audit teams

3. Architecture

Components

  • Test Orchestrator (ASP.NET Core)

  • Execution Engine (Workers or Containers)

  • Scenario Scripts (JSON/YAML)

  • Data Verifiers

  • Health Probes (HTTP, gRPC, SQL)

  • Reporting Dashboard (Angular)

4. Types of Continuity Tests

4.1 Failover Tests

Automatically move workloads to standby nodes.

4.2 Backup Restore Tests

Restore backup into isolated environment.

4.3 Chaos Engineering Tests

Inject controlled failures.

4.4 Integration Continuity Tests

End-to-end workflows executed periodically.

5. Scenario Definition

Example scenario file:

name: "Order Processing Path"
steps:
  - action: http-check
    url: https://orders/api/health
  - action: sql-check
    query: select count(*) from Orders
  - action: chaos
    target: service:payment
    type: cpu-spike
  - action: restore-check

6. Execution Engine

A .NET worker executes steps sequentially.

public class ScenarioExecutor
{
    public async Task ExecuteAsync(Scenario scenario)
    {
        foreach (var step in scenario.Steps)
        {
            await ExecuteStep(step);
        }
    }

    private Task ExecuteStep(ScenarioStep step)
    {
        return step.Action switch
        {
            "http-check" => HttpCheck(step),
            "sql-check" => SqlCheck(step),
            "chaos" => InjectChaos(step),
            _ => Task.CompletedTask
        };
    }
}

7. Angular Dashboard

  • Scenario management UI

  • Execution logs

  • RPO/RTO metrics

  • Drilldown history view

  • Success/failure heatmap

8. Reporting Engine

Report Contents

  • Scenario name

  • Timestamp

  • All steps executed

  • Duration of each step

  • Failures and impact analysis

  • Auto-generated PDF reports

9. Automation Scheduling

  • Cron-based scheduling

  • Kubernetes cron jobs

  • Azure DevOps pipelines

  • GitHub Actions

10. Best Practices

  • Run tests in isolated environment

  • Ensure synthetic users cannot impact production

  • Use secrets vaults for credentials

  • Maintain test evidence over long term

  • Continuously update scenarios as systems evolve

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