Why you should Plan to Fail
Because if you Fail to Plan then you’re planning to Fail
“Plan to Fail! Errr no thank you” I hear you say. Hang on.
Have you heard of the 5 Ps? Planning Prevents P*ss Poor Performance
Do you want to perform poorly? No, I didn’t think so either!
Think of it like muscle memory, like training – by the time you need to perform on matchday, you’ve done it 1000 times before. You know exactly what you need to do and how you are going to do it.
Or do you want to get on the pitch and wonder what position you’re supposed to be playing?
It never works out the way you think it should
Ideologies are great, I love them too. But they are just that, ideals. Rarely are they the reality of the situation or end product.
When it comes to disaster recovery, you NEED to know what’s going to happen, to have walked this road many times before. Sure, there can still be hiccups, but they are just that – speedbumps, not roadblocks.
You can bet your bottom dollar that if you have not at least planned you backup and disaster recovery, and certainly if you haven’t tested it end to end, that something unforeseen is lurking in the dark waiting to trip you up, slow you down, make a painful situation excruciating.
Hard Truths
The Hard thing about hard things, is that they are, well, hard! Hard facts, Hard truths, they are what they are, there are no shortcuts. Sorry but there’s no elevator here - you gotta’ take the stairs.
Nowhere is this truer than with backup and disaster recovery. You know where I’m going with this right? If you don’t have a working backup, there’s no getting one after the event. The horse has bolted and you’re not going to catch it.
Disaster Recovery can be somewhat different, you can cobble together a plan and start to rebuild using canned services like Azure or AWS, but it’s certainly not going to be quick.
In this type of scenario, your lack of planning for the worst is going to be laid bare for all to see, and that my friend, is p*ss poor performance, and everyone’s now thinking it too.
Plan for Success
Sure, you were busy, you knew you had to do it, it was on the to-do list for months, along with all sorts of other to-do’s like tidying up the comms cabinet and getting up your emails.
But wait? Does it sound like disaster recovery planning belongs on this list? Of course, it will be a nightmare to figure out what cable goes’ where there’s a network outage, but that’s exactly what it is – a nightmare, short lived and unpleasant. But an IT Disaster? That’s a whole other ballgame.
So let’s call it Planning for Success – sounds much more exciting right? This is exactly how you should think of it. Think of your disaster recovery planning and testing as your training to win, to win big, to knock it out the park and look like a god-damn superstar!
Here is just some of the many steps you will be ready to execute on:
Communicate Quickly and Efficiently, to Management, Employees and Customers
Draft in the Resources you need
Prep your Failover Site
Quickly Review the right SOPs you are going to need to pull this off
Build your Action Plan
Execute!
Test top-to-bottom before releasing Live to Users
Take time to fix whatever has caused the Disaster
Failback to your Primary Site
And who knows, you might even make it home in time for Dinner! Sound good? Because it is, and this is how it should be!