We all know that recovery planning for disasters is an important task for organizations of all sizes and industries. This can be a time-consuming and complicated process, but many organizations do eventually create a plan that meets their recovery objectives. “Ahh, now we can sleep better at night!” these IT and business leaders tell themselves. The DR plan is put on a shelf and forgotten about, in hopes it’s never needed.
Then one day, the organization’s building loses power for 48 hours and they decide to go ahead and dust off the DR plan and execute it. Fast-forward 72 hours and everyone in IT is feeling exhausted and stressed out after a marathon recovery effort full of Hail Mary’s and frantic conference calls with vendors. In the end, executives and board members are left to assess the damage and question the true disaster preparedness of their organization. They decide to begin conducting annual DR tests to make sure this never happens again.
Fast-forward a year or two, and everyone in IT begins to dread this annual DR test as a “lost weekend”. No matter how much time is spent in preparation, there always seems to be some unforeseen obstacle that causes things to go wrong. The snowball effect then ensues with frantic escalations to higher level engineers and vendor support. The end result? Everyone is burned out by Sunday evening with little to show for it. Your whole weekend just went down the tubes and you still don’t have a reliable business continuity plan to show executive stakeholders.
What a mess! The ideal solution to this problem would allow DR tests to be conducted easily by one or two individuals, on a weekday afternoon, multiple times per year. The solution should also make it easy to share the results of that test with executive stakeholders, external auditors, or even customers.
The solution exists with Expedient’s Push Button DR. Push Button DR makes it easy for customers to test their DR plan frequently and non-disruptively; best of all, unlimited supported or self-service DR tests are part of any Expedient DRaaS agreement. Failover occurs without IP or DNS changes, and built-in reporting means you’ll get the documentation you need to satisfy all stakeholders. Click here to view a sample report.
While Push Button DR helps to alleviate the pain associated with DR testing, it can also save your business with the push of a button. In September 2017 with Hurricane Irma bearing down on Florida, Tampa-based Bouchard Insurance used Expedient’s Push Button DR solution to proactively avoid IT disaster. By instantly failing over their entire IT environment to Expedient’s Memphis data center, Bouchard avoided a potential $100,000/day downtime cost. Watch this short video case study to learn more.
As Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Jonathan Rosenson is responsible for overseeing organizational functions that drive growth at Expedient. Jon additionally acts as an external spokesperson conveying the Expedient story. Follow him on Twitter.
