After about 27 years in IT, I was at a crossroads. I was in my early 50’s, had spent my entire life in some form of technical job, from help desk to app dev, and found myself looking at my future. Do I teach myself yet another programming language for the last few years of my career, or do I make the jump to the infrastructure side of the IT aisle and take on a new challenge, Disaster Recovery.
Well, I decided that this old dog had learned enough when it came to programming languages. I decided to trade in that hat for one that resembled that of a Project Manager, who would lead DR training, test plan creation, and DR exercises. How hard could it be, I asked myself? I had been involved with DR exercises in the past from an app dev perspective, but now it was going to be mine to lead.
I took over a process that was severely flawed. I did not know why or how it was flawed, but at a testing success rate of about 45% the last year before I got it, I figured that this was not a position the organization really wanted to be in. I started coming up with ideas on how to improve the process. I thought they were good, but what about others in the organization?
Our first exercise was a capability exercise. Upper-level management wanted to make sure some of my ideas would prove fruitful in our DR program. It was a success. The full exercise toward the end of the year? Another success. And when I say success, I mean that we came in with all applications successfully recovered, with only a couple of issues that the business testers found wrong. This was easy, right?
Well, the one thing that I have learned over the years is that success is only as good as your last exercise. People in the organization tend to question your methods, the importance of a DR Plan, or whether or not you are meeting minimum standards. While I believe that I have developed a good process, others are always quick to judge and tell you that there are better ways to do things, regardless of their knowledge on the subject.
The Disaster Recovery Blog is the place where we can discuss Disaster Recovery. Not a combination of Business Continuity/Resiliency AND Disaster Recovery, but rather Disaster Recovery and only Disaster Recovery. There are a couple of sites out there where you might find a post about something that relates to our jobs, but they are usually mixed in with a heavy dose of Business Continuity. Also, most training courses for Disaster Recovery incorporate tons of information about BC, when we are probably looking for training on DR specific topics. While I am not trying to diminish the value of BC, I just want a site where I can find DR specific topics. This is the place.
The Disaster Recovery Blog will be a place where DR Managers and practitioners can come to find articles on, you guessed it, Disaster Recovery. And, the main blog area will contain blogs by not only me, but by other DR Managers and practitioners in the industry. People will send me their blogs that they would like published, and I will put them on the DR Blog site, with all accolades going to the author. I want to create discussion groups so that we can discuss current topics, ask questions, or complain about something in the DR world.
It will also have sponsorships at some point. However, sponsorships are just that. Someone paying to try to reach all of you with their products. Just because someone has a link to their product site, or writes a white paper that I post in the White Paper section of this site, does not mean that I endorse any of these products. I will not make it my business to endorse any product listed, nor any company that is allowed to be a sponsor of the site. Since this site is going to be one of the only one of its kind on the internet, I want to make sure that companies can sponsor the site and post information in the form of white papers, but without my endorsement of them.
Hopefully I made myself clear. NO endorsements here. You can discuss them in the discussion sections and give your opinions, but I am not going to chime in and provide my opinion. That would not be professional, and is not the purpose of this blog.
I will also look for valuable feedback from DR Professionals. That is who this blog is for. I want this to be the site you visit on a weekly basis to find out what is new in the world of Disaster Recovery. I want you to come and ask questions and carry on conversations about process, function, and what does and doesn’t work, but mostly to make yourself a better DR Manager or practitioner. We can all add value and help each other do the best that we can to deliver a DR process that our organizations can be happy with.
Dan
