Does your disaster recovery plan work? Does it really work? Too often, disaster recovery plans are written and then placed on a shelf, not to be seen again until a periodic update task item comes around or a disaster strikes. During the passage of time between the shelving of the DR plan and one of the described events, life goes on. People create new virtual machines, reconfigure others, and go about their roles, which may include deploying entirely new services or replacing underlying infrastructure.
At Tech Field Day 9, delegates were treated to a presentation by NeverFail, a company which helps organizations validate the connectedness of their disaster recovery plans to what’s actually happening in the real world.
NeverFail focuses on IT continuity management, which is comprised of four key areas:
- Planning. This area includes creation of RPOs, RTOs and SLAs set
- Protection. Backup, availability, replication, continuous availability
- Assurance. Monitoring and reporting, ensuring that a DR plan is always current with latest changes
- Optimization. Ensures ongoing cost optimization through appropriate use of resources.
In the simplest terms, NeverFail’s IT Continuity Architect tool provides customers with ongoing dynamic tracking of infrastructure. This tracking compares actual infrastructure elements against defined business requirements to ensure that business availability requirements are being respected in the environment. When they aren’t, the tool raises alerts so that action can be taken.
NeverFail enabled a variety of protection tiers and enables granular reporting so that organizations can’t put to rest any worries about whether or not the DR plan is current.