Planning for Restore not Backup

During my 20+ years of working with Business Continuity (Backup, Restore, Disaster Recovery, Monitoring etc.) and crises management I have learned a lot. The best lesson is that “The more you know the more you understand how little you can”. It maybe sounds a bit strange but understanding that you always need to develop and get better is of key essence for your professional existence.

And speaking of existence, I would love to share the most important lesson ever that I see EVERYONE getting wrong. During my years I have noticed one thing in common regarding the size of the clients I visited. It didn’t matter if they were in different fields of business nor the number of employees (size of the company). I have been, literally, all over the globe and met a lot of fantastic people and cultures. But the one thing they all had in common was they all made BACKUPS…. sweet lord. OK, lets break it down shall we. Regardless what your business does it all comes down to one simple thing…being able to RESTORE.  

Back in the days all people had one great masterplan…that was “Let’s backup everything we got one time per day since then we are safe”. So this idea is as stupid as running towards the traffic on an interstate… Being able to understand your business Recover Capabilities is the FIRST and only conversation you should have when onboarding a system for backups. How could you possibly understand the Restore Capabilities if you only provide backups? So how could you get your head around this matter?

It all starts from understanding your business and answering a simple set of questions:

• Which Business Services do we got
• How important are those Business Services
• How does your Business Services relate to each other
• How does your Business Services relate to your IT infrastructure

There are A LOT MORE to it but these questions are the most important for you to understand so you can start building your restore plans for your Business Services. There are much more to it that meets the eye, believe me…

So, how can you possibly know your Business Services, their value for the business and how they relate to each other. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that you could leverage to understand the communication a server has? Well guess what, there is! Within the Azure Service Offerings you have something called Service Map that helps you understand how servers that builds up your Business Service relate to other components and applications.

Have a look at the Service Map documentation here:

(https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/insights/service-map)