On Twitter, Melissa Palmer (@vmiss) asked the question, “When was the last time you ran a full scale disaster recovery test?”
When I was with AbbVie, I was responsible for all the moving parts of the SAP infrastructure. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the luxury of it being a purely virtual environment. Most of the infrastructure included bare metal instances, with the most critical running on HPE Superdome hardware. To say coordinating the DR for a Fortune 100 was complex is an understatement. It took roughly a dozen people a few weeks to schedule and plan a full DR test.
I’m reminded of the importance of proper preparation for DR. It includes right-sizing the effort. For example, after returning home from the CTO Advisor Road Trip, we found our basement utility closet flooded with black water. It’s a legit disaster for a homeowner and impacted the CTO Advisor production schedule as my primary studio. As a result, we had to enact our disaster recovery plan.
It’s a reminder. Disaster recovery is about the recovery from a disaster. It’s first a plan for the following:
Understanding who impacted (safety)
What is impacted (processes)
Who to notify
How do you continue business operations
The process needed to continue operations
Returning to steady-state operations
This weekend was a mini-reminder of what’s important in the process and how to test properly.
When was the last time you ran a full DR test or, even more enlightening, when was the last time you had to implement your DR plan?
I'd venture to say "never" - and thank you for putting it back on the radar.