Wednesday, June 27, 2007

How ready are you for disaster recovery

With some power blackouts in NYC today, my team asked the question "How ready are we for disaster recovery?".

We do Business Continuity Planning (BCP) regularly, but there is nothing like the threat of the real thing to get the team really thinking if their plans are complete. Didn't we just change system X? Isn't system Y already running on backup? What about that new app we launched last month? How will we push latest code release without staging? Didn't Jack just replace Fred since our last DR run-through?

A CTO's job during a disaster recovery (DR) situation is to (1) create a sense of urgency, and (2) communicate to the business. I trust my team's ability to handle the difficult task of recovery once they are put on alert, and I can get out of the way.

I find it useful to treat potential disasters as the real thing, call it an unplanned drill. Ok, so power didn't go out in our NY data center, but what if it had? What if just data lines went down? It's a chance to freeze all project development for an hour or two and have your teams run through scenarios and contingencies.

Don't miss the opportunity to practise Disaster Recovery when the opportunity arises, one day you'll be glad you did.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

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Anonymous said...

Many companies thinks they do not need to protect themselves from possible data losses until they face the problem.
One of the best way till now for data protection is regular back up or double storage on two separate hard disk.

http://www.unirecovery.co.uk

Marie said...

Very creative posst