Disaster Recovery Planning

I hosted a Disaster Recovery tabletop exercise for the operations teams earlier this week. Hosted? The teams may say "tortured" is a better word. The main idea was to take our DR document out for a spin and see how it handled. The scenario was a little far-fetched, but the situation was that our core data center was damaged and not accessible. The exercise was designed for the members of the various teams to think about what the priority order of events would be to get us back into an operational state. The result of the exercise is that we have some work to do, especially regarding getting dependencies identified. I have about 10 pages of notes that I took and I invited everyone to send me their comments. My job for several days is going to be synthesizing all of the notes and comments and then suggesting changes to the DR plan.

There was at least one happy consequence. In the words of one team lead, "This was a tremendous team building exercise for my team. Previous to this exercise, it was not clear to all members how hard each person in the group works, nor how much passion these individuals have for their job. While people explained what they had done in their area to prepare for this type of disaster, I saw facial expressions change. Some people who hadn't spoken to each other in over a year, were having full fruitful conversations. Even better than that, they are talking this morning! I am not sure this was meant to be a team building exercise; however, for my group it was an excellent experience."