Validating the Recovery Gap

John Morency (Gartner analyst) has posted a blog highlighting the need for Recovery Gap Analysis. (link )
John’s blog is a valuable input to the Recovery Assurance debate. It highlights the need for discussing recovery gaps, recovery expectations and requirements with the business. Also, Roberta Witty of Gartner has dedicated blog time to issues on management attention within the Recovery Assurance space.
It’s my experience that crucial bottlenecks surface when IT management shift from gap planning to execution, i.e. actually testing if servers are recoverable and within expected RTO/RPO targets.
In most of our enterprise engagements, it comes down to “How can our overworked IT staff increase test productivity on a smaller budget?”:

A) Executing recoverability tests for more applications on a higher frequency (the annual test for a few systems proves insufficient in compliance-embraced organizations).

B) Expanding recovery assurance testing to not only a limited set of Tier 1 servers, but also Tier 2 and Tier 3.

C) Continuously Track & Document gap development over the course of the year.

Again, management attention and software automation for recovery assurance is key, increasing operational efficiency, eliminating manual recovery tests while mitigating business risks associated with insufficient testing.