Answer: Only if you want a shot at it actually working when you need it.

There are a few reasons you need to regularly test your recovery plans… I’ve got my top three.

1. Backups only work if they are good.
2. Your documentation is only useful if you can follow it.
3. You are soft and easily crushed.

Backups
Everyone knows the mantra of “backup, backup, backup” but you also have to test those backups for accuracy and functionality. I’m not going to beat this one endlessly, but please read an old post of mine – “Epic Fail #1” to see how backups can fail in spectacular, unplanned ways.

Documentation
Simply put, you need good documentation. You need easy to locate lists of vendors, support numbers, configuration details of machines and applications, notes on how “this” interacts with “that”, what services have dependencies on others and step by step instructions for processes you don’t do often and even those you DO do everyday.

When under pressure to troubleshoot an issue that is causing downtime, it’s likely you’ll loose track of where to find information you need to successfully recover.  Having clean documentation will keep you calm and focused at a time you really need to have your head in the game.

Realistically, your documentation will be out of date when you use it.  You won’t mean for it to be, but even if you have a great DR plan in place, I’ll bet you upgraded a system, changed vendors, or altered a process almost immediately after your update cycle. Regular review of your documents is a valuable part of testing, even if you don’t touch your lab.

My personal method is to keep a binder with hard copies of all my DR documentation handy.  Whenever I change a system, I make a note on the hard-copy. Quarterly, I update the electronic version and reprint it.  With the binder, I always have information handy in case the electronic version is not accessible and the version with the handwritten notes is often more up to date with the added margin notes. Even something declaring a section “THIS IS ENTIRELY WRONG NOW” can save someone hours of heading down the wrong path.

You
No one wants to contemplate their mortality, I completely understand. (Or maybe you just want to go on vacation without getting a call half way through. Shocker, right?) But if you happen to hold the only knowledge of how something works in your data center, then you are a walking liability for your company. You aren’t securing your job by being the only person with the password to the schema admin account, for example. It only takes one run in with a cross-town bus to create a business continuity issue for your company that didn’t even touch the data center.

This extends to your documentation. Those step-by-step instructions for recovery need to include information and tips that someone else on your team (or an outside consultant) can follow without having prior intimate knowledge of that system.  Sometimes the first step is “Call Support, the number is 800-555-1212” and that’s okay.

The only way to find out what others don’t know is to test.  Test with tabletop exercises, test with those backup tapes and test with that documentation.  Pick a server or application and have someone who knows it best write the first draft and then hand it to someone else to try to follow. Fill in the blanks. Repeat. Repeat again.

A lot of this process requires only your time. Time you certainly won’t have when your CEO is breathing down you neck about recovering his email.

Additional Resources
This is post part of a 15 part series on Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity planning by the US based Microsoft IT Evangelists. For the full list of articles in this series see the intro post located here: http://mythoughtsonit.com/2014/02/intro-to-series-disaster-recovery-planning-for-i-t-pros/

If you are ready to take things further, check out Automated Disaster Recovery Testing with Hyper-V Replica and PowerShell – http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithmayer/archive/2012/10/05/automate-disaster-recovery-plan-with-windows-server-2012-hyper-v-replica-and-powershell-3-0.aspx

I’ve done a little disaster recovery planning in my day. As an IT Professional, it’s really easy to get caught up in the day-to-day. We have users that need assistance, servers that need love (updates), applications that need upgrading… whatever today’s problem is, it needed solving yesterday. Disaster Recovery is often the elephant in the room, the insurance you don’t have time to buy. Everyone knows it’s needed, no one ever wants to use it and often, there is no clear way to begin.

I’ve always thought that being an IT Pro is one of the most powerful, powerless jobs in existence. We have our fingers on the pulse of what makes our businesses run, we have access to ALL THE DATA and we have the power to control access and availability to the resources. But we are often slaves to the business – we are responsible for providing the best up times, the best solutions and the best support we can. Facing budgets we can’t always control while trying to explain technology to people who don’t have time to understand it.

So where do you begin when tasked with updating or creating your disaster recovery plan? The good news is you don’t need money or lots of extra hardware to start good disaster recovery planning – grab the note-taking tools of your choice and start asking questions.

Here are my three main questions to get started:

1. What is the most important application or services in each business unit or for the business overall?
2. How much downtime is acceptable?
3. How much data loss is acceptable?

These are your considerations. Period. I didn’t mention money, but I know you want to argue that you can’t recover without it. And that is true.  But until you know what your goal is, you have no idea how much it may or may not cost.

This post is one of many in disaster recovery series being penned by the IT Pro Evangelists at Microsoft. As the series progresses, you’ll find the complete list on Brian Lewis’s blog post, “Blog Series: DR Planning for IT Pros.” We will cover tools and applications you can consider in you planning and get you started with using them. They have various costs, but until you know your goal, you won’t know what tools will help and can’t argue the budget.

So let’s put the pencil to the paper and start answering those three questions.

Start at the top:  Go to upper management, have your CTO or CIO to pull together a leadership meeting and rank what systems the business units use and what they think is needed first. Get them to look at the business overall and determine how much downtime is too much, how quickly do they want services recovered and how much data they are willing to lose.

When it comes to determining your internal SLA you do need to know what scenario you are planning for. Preparing for a riot that blocks access to your office is different than an earthquake that renders your data center a steaming pile of rubble. Ultimately, you want different plans for different scenarios, but if you must start somewhere, go with the worst case so you can cover all your bases.

But what if you can’t get leadership to sit down for this, or they want you to come to the table first with draft plan. Just GUESS.

Seriously, you have your hand on the data center, you know the primary goals of your business. If it was your company, what do you think you need to recover first? Use your gut to get you started. Look at your data center and pick out some of the key services that likely need to be recovered first to support the business needs. Domain controllers, encryption key management systems, infrastructure services like DNS and DHCP, communication tools and connectivity to the Internet might float to the top.

Sort the List: People want email right away? Great, that also needs an Internet connection and access to your authentication system, like Active Directory. People want the document management system or CRM or some in-house app with a database back-end? Fabulous, you need your SQL Servers and maybe the web front-end or the server that supports the client application.

Gather Your Tools: Look at your list of loosely ranked servers, devices and appliances and start building a shopping list of things you need to even start recovery. I always start with the “steaming pile of rubble” scenario, so my list starts like this:

1. Contact information for hardware and software vendors
2. Contact information and locations where my data center can function temporarily
3. List of existing hardware and specifications that would need to be met or exceeded if ordering new equipment for recovery
4. List of operating systems and other software, with version details and support documentation
5. Names of the people in the company that would be crucial to the successful recovery of the data center

Type this all up. If any of the things listed above involve looking at a server or visiting a web page, remember that in the “pile-of-rubble” scenario you will likely not have access to those resources. Save it wherever you save this type of documentation. Then print out a copy and put it in a binder on your desk. Print out another copy, seal it in an envelope and take it home.

Congratulations! You are closer to a usable DR plan than you were before you started and we’ve just scratched the surface. Disaster Recovery planning is often pushed off until tomorrow. Whatever you have today, be it an outdated document from your company leadership, server documentation that is a year old, or NOTHING, you can take time each day to improve it. How you plan is going to depend on the needs of your organization and you won’t be able to complete the process in a silo, but you can get started.

I really enjoy disaster recovery planning. It’s challenging, it’s ever changing and I haven’t even mentioned how things like virtualization, Hyper-V Replica and Azure can be some of the tools you use. Stay tuned for more in the series about how some of those things can come into play. Sometimes the hardest part about disaster recovery planning is just getting started.

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