Cyclone season: the 7 IT tests to run before December

July 14, 2026 · 3 min read · SOVALYX Technologies

In Mauritius, cyclone season runs from November to April: class III and IV warnings, power cuts, disrupted telecoms. The only way to know whether your IT will survive it is to test it beforehand — here are the 7 tests to run before December, from the simplest to the most complete.

Why test before December, not during a warning

Every austral summer brings its share of cyclone warnings, power outages and degraded telecom links. A disaster recovery plan (DRP) you discover during a class III warning is a plan that fails: teams are at home, suppliers are overloaded, and every improvisation costs hours — and an hour of downtime has a price. In October and November, by contrast, the weather is calm, teams are available and there is still time to fix what the tests reveal.

The 7 tests, from simplest to most complete

1. Actually restore a backup

A backup only exists once it has been restored. Pick a representative server or database, restore it to an isolated environment, time the operation, check data integrity. If your backups only live on site, this test should worry you: a cyclone is a site-level disaster. (On tamper-proof copies, see our article on ransomware and backups.)

2. Check the off-site backup

Cyclones bring flooding, roof damage and long outages. A copy of your data must exist outside your building — another site or a cloud — and must be restorable independently.

3. Fail over to the recovery site

If you have a recovery site or standby infrastructure, run a real failover of at least one critical service. Not a paper exercise: an actual switchover, with users confirming they can work.

4. Measure your real RTO

Time the full recovery: detection, decision, failover, verification. The number you get is your real RTO — compare it with what management believes it is. The gap is usually instructive.

5. Test power autonomy

UPS units: how many real minutes do they hold? Generator: does it start under load? Is there fuel? Who knows how to start it on a Sunday?

6. Walk the alert chain and the on-call rota

Simulate an incident outside business hours: who gets alerted, through which channel, how fast? Are the phone numbers up to date? If everything rests on one person, you have a single point of failure.

7. Work for one hour in degraded mode

Deliberately cut access to one critical service for an hour and observe: are there paper procedures? Is the documentation available offline? How does the team communicate if IP telephony goes down? (This test also covers the international connectivity scenario — see the plan B for a cut submarine cable.)

What a first test almost always reveals

Outdated documentation, forgotten dependencies, passwords living in one person's head, a real RTO far above the assumed one. That is normal: the whole point of testing is to find these gaps in October rather than in January. It is also the value of monitoring and on-call under SLA as SOVALYX operates them: someone is watching, even on 25 December.

Recap: your test plan before the season

Seven tests, two months. If even one fails, better to know now — talk to a specialist before the first warnings.

🧰 The companion tool: Would your IT survive a cyclone? — free · 2 minutes.

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