Why Disaster Recovery Procedures Matter

Check out this gem of an email that I received the other morning from a high profile, and well funded, US based startup to whom’s software as a service I subscribe to:

Yesterday morning we had a major server outage affecting our 1.0 customers. We completely lost one of our database servers. The day was spent rebuilding and restoring everything we possibly could.

There were a handful of accounts that the restore completely failed on. Yours was one of those accounts. We have exhausted all available avenues for restoring the account data with no positive results.

Quite simply, I find this astounding! I would have thought that should have had a mirrored/clustered database server, and at the very least held an offline backup of my information. Obviously not.

In my previous life prior to YouDo, I spent countless hours with auditors going over BCP and DR plans, and countless hours making sure we’d avoid this kind of screw up ever happening to us. I used to hate it. Really hate it.

But now I’ve been on the receiving end of what seems like an inadequate disaster recovery plan, and can relate to the pain that our customers could feel – it’s going back near the top of my agenda.