* Please share your golden rule for disaster recovery planning
When I worked at vendor companies, one of the things that annoyed me most about analysts was that many of them seemed to have a somewhat precarious hold on reality. Often we would ask them specific questions and get sweeping generalizations for answers; sometimes bland platitudes replaced the generalizations; occasionally we got some useful stuff too.
I do remember that in many cases we would leave meetings wondering why we had paid such exorbitant fees to people whose reputations seemed to be based on their intuitive grasp of the blindingly obvious.
Now I too am an analyst, but hopefully not like the ones I once contracted with. Only my clients know for sure.
The obvious is not always obvious, of course. (Test question for today: anyone remembers the short story by Poe that relied on this fact?)
In the course of writing this column, I sometimes find my readers bring up embarrassingly obvious points as well. In this case however, what is obvious to them may not have been so obvious to me. Take for example the case of one of my readers, “Ray from the FAA.”
Ray is an IT manager for the U.S. government, and it is no doubt at least partially to the credit of him and his colleagues that I have landed safely as many times as I have taken off. In a letter, Ray raised the issue – now obvious – that the thousands of readers who see this newsletter twice a week represent a substantial network of experience and expertise. Why, he suggested, shouldn’t we tap into that resource from time to time?
Not a bad point, and one that is so obvious I wonder why we have never done it before.
Ray’s note to me came right after I returned from StorageWorld Conference, where I led a few panel discussions. At the end of the “disaster recovery roundtable” I asked my panel members – senior IT guys who really knew their stuff – to provide a single guiding principle that the audience could take away and use when they were implementing their own disaster recovery plans, they all agreed on one point: once you have made a plan, TEST IT.
So simple. So obvious. And apparently, so rarely done.
Most of us have come across obvious, simple, and perhaps cheap solutions to problems, or at least have learned to avoid certain mistakes. Which brings me to the interesting point of knowledge sharing. Let’s try it.
Let’s try to compile a few useful rules of the road for the IT community.
Here is a question for my readers: Do you have a simple rule you can share with the rest of the readers on the subject of disaster recovery planning? If you have something like that, and can share it in a description of 100 words or less, I’ll print it in this newsletter. Send something in and if it looks useful, we’ll get it in print.
Now it’s your turn.
