You have just finished the Disaster Recovery (DR) plan for your agency, so you are ready for floods, tornadoes, power outages, and hurricanes. Or are you? Maybe; maybe not…
Chances are that modifications to your enterprise took place while your DR plan was being put together—patches were installed, new security protocols were implemented, and LAN speeds were updated. More than likely those changes are not reflected in your new DR plan.
SungardAS’ Brian Armknecht gives guidance on this very topic in his latest Forbes article. The article is summarized here as follows:
With the massive work of establishing a DR plan behind you, your team is likely focusing on activities that will drive revenue to your company. While this is obviously important, it makes it difficult to give your DR plan the ongoing attention needed to keep it in line with the improvements you are even now making to production IT.
There are solutions to this quandary. You can assign internal resources to maintain your DR environment and keep it aligned with production IT. The only problem with an in-house solution occurs when you need to apply those internal resources to other strategic business initiatives. In that case, you are faced with the problem of people not being able to be in two places at once. Splitting a resource between two directives too often results in both projects being performed at less than maximum effectiveness.
If you are strapped for internal resources, giving the task of DR upkeep to an outside provider can make a big difference. A good disaster-recovery-as-a-service partner will work with you on an ongoing basis to ensure that your DR environment evolves along with the production environment. They will interface with your change management team to record any updates you have made and reflect those in your DR plan.
You will save time and money because you won’t have to pull your people off of maintaining and improving your production applications. You can stay focused on business strategy while the recovery service provider stays focused on DR strategy.
For more information regarding change management for your DR plan, read the full Forbes article.
