IT Employment

I have been doing DR for at least 10 years and I have yet to find a vendor that knows true DR. Mostly they rely on incomplete backups and cannot even successfully recover a test system let alone a live one and I am talking big names here in the medical IT community. In the last few years they have a better grasp but that is more due to efforts by us endusers then themselves. I am required to restore my main systems twice a year in less than 24 hours. Anyway, vendors I have found are a poor source for information on restoring your system. They are good for specific information on say your LAN driver is not working or some process is malfunctioning which you may run into when restoring your system from backup on a different platform.

Mike Talon's suggestion that IT Disaster Recovery planners use vendors as a resource is on the mark - there is no way one or two IT people can keep up with everything; vendors should be on the leading (hopefully not bleeding) edge of their product categories. Use vender expertise; compare vendor input.

HOWEVER, Mike's focus remains amiss. In order to have a SUCCESSFUL "Disaster Recovery" plan IT must promote ENTERPRISE Business Continuity planning. Protecting the critical Business Units (read Profit Centers) (a) shows the importance of IT (and other support functions) and (b) may take the financial burden of planning off the IT budget (and move it to an organization expense). Moreover, an enterprise Business Continuity plan will remove some of the "IT only cares about itself" attitude common in most Business Units.

BTW, IT stands to gain some new "toys" with Enterprise Business Continuity planning - and maybe on the organization budget rather than IT's.

DR plans may be a a lot of work but one of the most important steps is getting buy-in from the user community. If they don't buy-in then it won't work. Similarly they should be the folk to decide whats critical and whats not. So they should be doing a whole lot of the definition work for you.