The production instance must have a rehearsed restore path

Control Statement: The organisation must hold a restore path for the production instance that has been exercised, with the last rehearsal and its outcome recorded.

Description: This control requires the rehearsal, not the backup. Backups may well exist — taken by the hosting provider, the platform vendor or the organisation’s own infrastructure — but a restore that has never been performed is a hope, not a capability. The restore path must cover both data and configuration: a restore that resurrects yesterday’s records under last month’s configuration is an incident of its own.

Rationale: The first time a restore is attempted must not be the day one is needed. Every step that can fail — finding the backup, having the access to use it, the elapsed time, the configuration coming back in step with the data — fails cheaply in a rehearsal and expensively in an incident. An organisation that cannot say when its restore path was last exercised does not have one; it has a belief about one.

Audit Procedure:

1. Confirm a documented restore path exists for the production instance, covering data and configuration.
2. Confirm it has been exercised, and record when, by whom, and into what environment.
3. Confirm the rehearsal’s outcome and elapsed time were recorded.
4. Confirm the last rehearsal falls within the cycle the organisation has defined for it.

Remediation:

1. Establish where backups live and who can perform a restore — the organisation, the hosting provider, or both.
2. Exercise a restore into a non-production environment, end to end.
3. Record the outcome, the elapsed time and what failed; fix what failed and record the fix.
4. Define a rehearsal cycle and name its owner.

Default Value: Creatio does not rehearse restores and provides no record of one. Whether backups exist at all is a property of the hosting arrangement, not of anything visible in the instance’s configuration.