Proof not Feelings are Critical to Delivering on your Disaster Recovery Plan

Determining a solid foundation for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans are a significant challenge for enterprises of all sizes and shapes. Understanding the business value of your organization's data is the first step to achieving that solid foundation as it provides a framework for what's critical and what's not so critical to the operation of your organization. Once this is achieved and you have a DR plan that satisfies all internal and external commitments, the need to regularly review, change and optimize those DR plans is critical to the plan's overall success and/or failure.

A true DR plan is not something that is just stored on someone's desk and reviewed and maybe tested once a year. It's something that all infrastructure, application and business teams need to review and test regularly (no less than once a year and ideally once a month or more) so organizations can understand their DR plan's limitations, risks, and overall impact to their environment. 

The fact that most organizations are not testing their DR plan or have much confidence in the one that they do have became readily apparent in a recent study sponsored by Symantec which found:

• Only 12% of organizations feel that they have an excellent DR plan/strategy in place that will successfully meet their business objectives during an outage.
• 27% see their plans are "pretty good"
• 33% say their plans are "average"
• 22% say their plans "need work"
• 6% say they have no plan or just a documented one.

The study also calls out the fact that organizations believe that human error is the largest reason for unplanned downtime at least 24% of the time. This tells me there is still a slew of work out there that needs to be done to bring these plans up to snuff or at least to the point where their DR plans can be executed time and time again with a predictable success ratio. Further, most organizations only "feel" or "see" their DR plans as being solid, but do they have the proof they need to back up those feelings and anecdotal observations?

The development of an on-going review and best practices process for your DR plan is crucial to its success because configurations can and often do change rapidly in IT environments. So even though the plan and test may have been executed flawlessly last year (or even last week or month), that doesn't necessarily mean that it will do so again the next time around.   

Since not every organization tests their DR plan as frequently or as thoroughly as they should, Symantec's recent addition of Veritas Disaster Recovery Advisor to its Veritas CommandCentral storage software portfolio is helping organizations minimize the amount of pain and frustration that they need to endure during a DR plan review.

DR Advisor scans all of the bits and pieces of an organization's production and DR infrastructure and validates that everything will function as planned if a failover to the DR site is necessary. Further, if your DR plan will not work as forecast, DR Advisor provides a list of problem areas that organizations can work from to remediate the situation.

DR Advisor is an agentless tool that provides proactive versus reactive risk assessments of corporate production and DR infrastructures that draws on Symantec's extensive knowledge base of past concerns and issues that other environment have experienced. One of the best parts about this tool is that it removes as much human error from the equation as possible. This ensures that an organization's ability to execute on its DR plan is not adversely affected by configuration drift which are changes, and modifications that occur in your production environment but are not accounted for and performed in your DR environment. Without DR Advisor, the only time organizations may find out their DR plan does not work is when they actually go to test or perform a true DR.

Organizations do not create effective DR plans by accident and even those that "feel" or "observe" that their DR plans are "excellent" or "pretty good" need more than just "feelings" to justify to executive management why they should be confident their DR plan will work. Symantec's new DR Advisor provides these organizations the tangible proof that they need to quantify that their DR plans will work as designed while also helping any organization achieve a higher level of confidence by identifying what gaps exist between their production and DR environments that may prevent their DR plan from delivering as expected. A proactive approach such as what DR Advisor delivers allows organizations to do more than just feel good about having a DR plan in place but gives them the confidence that they can deliver on it should the situation warrant.