Earlier in the week one of our consultant Blog authors addressed the issue of Integration and EDI Disaster Recovery Plans (DRPs) and testing those plans in a simulated outage...Necessary Evils: EDI Disaster Recovery.
The article struck a cord with many and prompted some discussion among our followers and here internally. The discussion topics resulting from the Blog included...
- What are the components of a good DRP?
- Can clustered architectures with fail over and load balancing reduce the need for a plan, the instances it would need to be invoked, or having an ultra complex plan?
- When one speaks of DRPs are we talking about just planning and testing EDI and Integration systems and connected systems, or does planning and testing simulate the catastrophic failure/disablement of an entire data center?
- Does the DRP size, complexity, and system redundancies vary based on organization size, industry, or portion of business (revenue) relying on EDI and Integration for transaction processing?
- Can advanced communications tools and perimeter servers be used as part of the plan to provide "always on" functionality for trading partners...at least from an inbound perspective?
The questions above are just a few of the topics that came up.
One other observation from the original blog...with the exception of a client or two nobody here at Remedi could remember the last time the matter of simulating an outage came up with a client.
We address disaster recovery in architecture design and planning. We also assist clients in DRP document updates and development of backup processes. But rarely are we involved with disaster recovery simulations.
This caused us to wonder how many firms have EDI and Integration DRPs, AND actually go through simulation exercises.
COMPLETE THIS SURVEY... to log your disaster recovery data points.
We will compile the results and make the findings available in future Blogs.
