What is the other half?  Testing. Testing does two things for your recovery strategy: it identifies weaknesses, and it alerts you to misconceptions about your overall strategy. Weakness in a plan is just that, weakness.  It is common to see people try to gloss over or even hide deficiencies that appear during testing.  Don’t be afraid of the results and don’t avoid them.  Fix them. Finding hidden problems is the point of carrying out exercises and scenarios.  It is so much easier to find solutions to issues in a non-production environment than it is to do it when you are in a real situation.

Misconception is another concept that can be lost in testing.  What I mean by misconception, is you might think that you have an air tight plan.  You know all of your dependencies and have accounted for every possible problem.  Don’t be so sure.  I have carried out testing on a system and had it go smoothly with little issue.  Then the next time I conduct the same test, it fails because one of the dependencies has changed and no one thought to update the plan.

If you have not previously worked in a Disaster Recovery capacity, creating plans and testing scenarios may seem like a difficult task.  It can be.  I will not try and tell you it is not.  Much of the information that is available is not easy to find, and many times what you find is only a portion of an entire concept.  Having no clear starting point and some (but not all) of the information you need, can lead to endless frustration.

One way to make sure that all of your time, effort, and money are not wasted is to employ the help of an outside resource, like a consultant or vendor.  Assistance with planning and testing from an outside company has many advantages: They are 100% focused on your needs and goals.  This means that you will need minimal internal resources to assist. They have gained invaluable experience from working in multiple environments.  Many times an experienced IT services company can provide solutions and offer insights that you would never have thought of yourself. Everything that they offer equals times savings, which can add up to cost savings over time.

Vendors are in the business of supplying solutions. If you purchase a backup or recovery solution from a third party, they will often offer additional services that fall right in line with planning and testing those solutions.  Some vendors will even work with existing recovery plans and integrate their product solution right into it for you.  It is in a solution provider’s best interest to have complementary services like this.

Photo Credit: Network 24

Matthew Shallue, Disaster Recovery Specialist and Systems Administrator, Financial Industry.

You can find more of Matthew’s work on his blog, Disaster Admin.

Hi there.  The name’s Robroy.  You don’t know me, but – can I ask a personal question?  It’s about your medical history.

Have you ever had amnesia?

No?  Me neither.  In fact, I have never even met someone who had it.  And yet, rare as it is in real life, amnesia must be one of the most commonly dramatized illnesses in all of Hollywood.

Goldie Hawn lost her memory in Overboard.  Mickey Rourke lost his memory in Angel Heart.  So did Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic.  And Jim Carrey in … what was that one called … Spotless in Seattle?

Wouldn’t it be great if we had amnesia?  If more companies caught a little case of it?  Think of the benefits.  We could wipe out all of our old excuses.  Starting with the software and technology that runs and grows our business.  You’d take one look at our server racks and say, “Why are we hosting our stuff on company hardware, instead of in the cloud?”

You’d be absolutely right.  With cloud computing, we could get more computer power, instantly, on demand, at a fraction of the cost.

And nobody could say, “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it!”  Because we wouldn’t know that.  We’d have amnesia.

Right?  That Hitchcock classic, Spellbound.  Gregory Peck.  Let’s list some more in the comments below.  Who else had amnesia?

Rob Macdonald, Partner & Senior Consultant, EntreQuest.

Read more Robroy at www.robroysblog.com

Let’s relate this to Golf.

How many times have you been invited to play a new golf course that you have never been on (I apologize if you are not a golfer, but if you are not that is your problem)? First of all, it is exciting to play a new course, and second, you know nothing about the course except what you have heard from someone else.  You step on the first tee, and you bomb the ball right down the middle –“because that’s what you do.” However, when you get to where your ball should be, you find that it rolled into the pond. How did that happen? Well, if you would have visited the course before, you would have known that it was only 220 yards to the water, and you could have hit your 3 iron 200 yards. Instead, you bombed your Driver 240 yards smack dead into the pond. Why did that happen?  Because you didn’t have a plan of attack to play the course – you just showed up, and decided to try and “figure it out.”  You think to yourself, “Oh well, I’ve got 11 more brand new golf balls fresh out of the pack.” Is that the way you would treat your business? How many times do you miss before you look at what is right and what is wrong? That’s all fine and dandy for a Sunday golfer but what do the Pros do? Let’s take a look.

Before Pros even play the course themselves, they send out their caddy to walk the course and take precise measurements. They do this by walking the course forward and backwards. Now, if the goal of a golfer is to get the ball into the hole, where should they start? The hole of course! Looking up the fairway from the hole paints a completely different picture. You are able to see where the course designer strategically placed all of the “obstacles.” However, you may not have noticed these same “obstacles” from the tee box.

Once the caddy has his measurements, he takes this knowledge and directs the Pro to hit the ball from the tee to a very specific location on the fairway (with intentions to set him up to be in the best possible position to hit his next shot onto the green).  The Pro must trust all the information that his caddy has given him so that the only thing left for him to do is to visualize where the ball is going, and then commit to that beautiful swing that he has spend countless hours perfecting. He hits his next shot onto the green, sinks his putt, and makes a birdie. Now, he has to repeat this process 17 more times.

Is this what your sales cycle feels like? How prepared are you for challenges that you can not foresee? Most importantly, how accurate is the information that you have available to you to make good business decisions?

Mike Gillett, Account Executive, GoBeyond IT

Upon further review, you need to dig deeper to see why their process works so well.  Let’s take a look. Jimmy Johns is a Culture and a way of doing business. Jimmy Johns success lies in the preparation to take care of the customer through proper planning and staffing. When you enter the store you are greeted immediately.  The cashier asks to take your order. Next to the cashier is the “breadman” who listens to the customer and begins to prepare the bread by cutting and garnishing the sandwich. He/She passes the sandwich to their teammate who puts the required meat on the sandwich, and then passes it to a third teammate who wraps it up for the customer. Meanwhile, the “breadman” is listening for the next order. This is all performed in sixty seconds or less.

How is it performed consistently? Two breads, seven meats, one cheese, and freshly prepared tuna.  No soups, no salads, no toasting of the bread, no hot foods. If you want cross selling, you can get chips, pickles, cookies, fountain sodas and bottled water.  That’s it! Jimmy Johns will not even offer you a bag or napkins for one sandwich.  They want you to go around to the end to get it yourself (but you would never notice that unless someone pointed it out for you).  Most people walk out the door with the sandwich in hand, no bag or napkins – paper product savings adds up! The process is so seamless that you don’t care about napkins or a bag. Your meal is delivered to you fast and it tastes great.

Why does this model work so well? SIMPLICITY! They are not spending millions of dollars trying to develop the next great bottled fruit spritzer with extra virgin pomegranate juices to try and capture 1/10th of 1% of market share.  They take the approach from Field of Dreams: “If you build it, he will come.”

Now, you might be asking yourself -”how does this relate to my business model?”  Have you spent so much time trying to invent, market and sell the next latest and greatest thing to come along, or are you focusing on your core competencies that establish and still run you business profitability today?  Are you lean and mean so that as the economy turns, you are poised for growth?

Our company is like the Jimmy Johns of the world in that we provide a simplistic approach to your technology. We focus on one thing and one thing only – we make sure your IT works, and works well.  We don’t do websites, we don’t do SEO, we don’t sell software! But, we will take care of your IT so you don’t have to. We deliver it fast, seamless, and I promise your meals will taste better as a result if IT!

Mike Gillett, Account Executive, GoBeyond IT