There is a story about a farmer who, looking for help, hires a man based on a recommendation that he “sleeps through a storm.”  One night, a fierce storm hits the farm, and the farmer wakes in a panic, rushing to make sure everything is OK.  He finds the helper sleeping soundly, the animals safe in their pens, and the farm weathers the storm with no problems.

In IT, storms can happen at any time.  Hard drives can fail.  Servers can crash.  Power outages happen, and HVAC failures can turn a server room into a sauna.  Not to mention true disasters like fire, floods, and tornadoes.

The question is: can your IT staff sleep through the storm?

Mine can’t - Yet.

Why?  I can cite a lot of reasons, most of which revolve around the frenetic pace at which we’ve rolled out new technology.  In a span of less than two years, we’ve transformed our IT infrastructure from physical servers, to a 100% virtualized environment ready for deployment into “The Cloud.”

Some things – full documentation, updated procedures, DR planning – got left behind in the shuffle.

I’m willing to bet that you are in a similar situation, if not for the same reason.

Take a second and really think – what would happen if (insert your catastrophe here)?

If you’re like me, you’ve spent a few sleepless nights pondering those questions.

We’re kicking off July with a focus on Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity.  We’ll be updating our documentation, writing up new procedures, and nailing down our DR and BC plans.

It’s going to be boring, tedious, and thankless work.  I guarantee when we’re done, we’ll be rolling out new technology that will render all of that work obsolete, and we’ll have to start all over again.

But it’ll be worth it.

They’re calling for heavy thunderstorms soon.