Not all IT disaster recovery (DR) is equal. All organizations are at different stages in the maturity curve and the work of improving recovery and testing is never done as new threats emerge all the time.
This article outlines the importance of understanding the maturity of your IT disaster recovery processes and procedures and how IT disaster recovery software can help accelerate the maturity journey.
What is an IT disaster recovery process?
First, let’s quickly review what an IT disaster recovery process is: the process of restoring and recovering IT infrastructure, systems and applications after a disaster event, like an outage.
Key objectives of an IT disaster recovery process
The purpose of an IT DR process is to get a company’s operations back online and functioning with minimal downtime and disruption.
Assessing the maturity of your IT disaster recovery process
As with any process, in order to make improvements, you need to understand how mature the current DR process is. The first step is to assess your current process with an IT disaster recovery assessment checklist, then you can understand your IT disaster recovery challenges, and create a plan to make process improvements.
The 5 stages of the IT disaster recovery maturity process
We’ve outlined the five stages of IT disaster recovery maturity to help you see where you fall and find out how you can improve your DR processes.
Stage 1: Unstructured IT disaster recovery
Stage one of the disaster recovery maturity curve is self governed with individuals finding their own ways to deal with recovery needs - it is random and undocumented and has no dedicated resources or budget. This approach to recovery is often reactive rather than proactive.
In this unstructured phase, recovery plans are completely manual and usually paper- or spreadsheet-based and there may not even be recovery plans for every application or service. In a recent survey of 300 IT disaster recovery decision makers, we found that 40% are not using any automation at all for their recovery activities and 24% don’t have executable recovery plans. If large-scale tests such as data center tests are carried out at all, they are done infrequently. At this stage, tests consume a large amount of organizational effort to plan and execute - sometimes as long as 12 weeks.
Maintaining disaster recovery plans at this stage is difficult and time consuming. There is greater risk and uncertainty as organizations don’t have confidence in their ability to recover in a timely fashion. This also leads to a reduced capacity to perform multiple tests throughout the year and longer recovery times.
The risks:
- Lack of confidence in your ability to recover
- Increased risk of regulatory fines
Stage 2: Regular IT disaster recovery
In stage two, disaster recovery processes are usually managed at the departmental level, so although they are more structured than stage one, they are still siloed and have few resources dedicated to them. Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), if defined, may not be regularly measured and assessed.
There may be a regular review of recovery plans taking place but usually only after a significant change has happened. Large-scale testing is likely performed on a regular basis and recovery plans will exist in an executable form.
This level of maturity ensures recovery plans are kept in step and reviewed in light of the most recent changes to applications and services. At this stage, there is increased confidence that the organization can effectively and quickly recover from a total loss scenario. Capturing, executing, and measuring the recovery steps are no longer separate activities but are closely linked.
The advantages:
- Increased confidence
- Reduced risk
Stage 3: IT disaster recovery with integrations to ITSM and CMDB
At this stage in the maturity journey, senior management is bought in and committed to funding recovery efforts. There is regular testing across all departments, the process is defined and regularly updated, and there are some integrations between technology resilience tooling and the ITSM suite for change, problem, and configuration management (although the full potential has not been reached - only 6% of the respondents in our survey said that 100% of their recovery activities are automated). Customer intelligence data from the configuration management database (CMDB) is being appropriately used to augment recovery plans.
The advantages:
- Reduced effort
- Improved experience
- Using a golden sources of data
Stage 4: IT disaster recovery with automation and improved scenario coverage
In stage four, organizations are moderately prepared for disaster recovery but not quite mature. Recovery staff are funded, there are documented recovery plans, and RTOs are defined but there are still siloes. Some business units may have achieved a high state of preparedness but, as a whole, the enterprise is at best moderately prepared and still lacking executive buy-in and funding.
On the positive side, at this stage organizations will start automating manual activities where appropriate and will have recovery plans for all criticalities of applications and services.
The addition of automation can lead to a reduction in Recovery Time Actuals (RTAs) and allows team members to focus on higher-value activities rather than being bogged down in manual processes. This increases confidence that the organization can quickly and effectively recover applications and services.
The advantages:
- Increased confidence
- Reduced recovery time
- Reduced costs thanks to automation
Stage 5: Optimized IT disaster recovery
At the final stage, IT disaster recovery is state of the art, there are integrations across the tech recovery stack and the system of execution is an automated recovery plan that everything integrates to. With this setup, progress can be viewed in real time, there is continuous improvement to the process based on audit logs, and senior management participates in recovery activities. Change control methods and continuous process improvement keep the enterprise at a high state of preparedness and able to adapt to changes in the business environment.
With this level of maturity, testing can be performed unannounced and accurately mirrors how the enterprise would respond in a real incident. The organization can intentionally degrade active/active systems and applications during the online day to prove resilience. Major Incident Management resources coordinate and execute test events to gain familiarity with the process and tooling and the organization is beginning to stress its systems and people to identify areas of improvement before an incident occurs.
The advantages:
- Reduced risk
- Increased confidence in your resilience posture
Developing an IT disaster recovery testing process
Testing your IT DR process is a crucial part of assessing your maturity. It’s important to outline a comprehensive and well documented IT DR process and IT disaster recovery testing methods.
There are different disaster recovery methods for testing - each providing different levels of effectiveness. Plan review, tabletop test, and simulation are the three most often used methods to test DR processes. It’s important to plan your IT DR exercises with the same level of preparedness as live recovery scenarios.
Get on the path to IT disaster recovery maturity
The right tooling is essential to progressing along the IT disaster recovery maturity journey. As mentioned above, the ability to automate laborious manual processes and integrate with your entire technology stack have a huge impact on the confidence you have in your recovery and the speed and accuracy with which you can test.
The advantages of using Cutover for IT disaster recovery
Cutover’s SaaS platform enables enterprises to standardize IT DR processes by connecting teams and technology with automated runbooks. The automated disaster recovery software provides:
- Preparedness for unannounced disaster recovery simulations and events
- The ability to rehearse incident simulations for network, system, and application outages and human errors
- The elimination of manual processes through automation and integrations across the tech stack
- Documentation of the recovery process in detailed, dynamic, automated runbooks
- Connecting teams and technology for efficient collaboration
- Post-event analysis that helps you to optimize plans, reduce risk, and meet RTOs
Let us help you get started on your IT disaster recovery maturity journey - schedule a demo today or contact us here.