Evaluating your disaster recovery program’s maturity level
Disaster recovery is an area where most of the best practices and knowledge focus on the development of the plan itself. In many companies, DR lacks in the area of assessing the quality of the process and how well integrated it is with daily operations. This can be noted by the scarcity of models available to describe the different levels of maturity of a DR plan.
A maturity model that comes to mind, although it is aimed at IT services, is the ITIL Process Maturity Framework. ITIL can be used in this context as an example of how to illustrate different levels of maturity.
A disaster recovery (DR) program describes the overall process or planning for DR. And most DR planners will agree that a disaster recovery plan is not complete until it has been tested, identifying gaps in the plan or areas that need improvement. Unfortunately, many companies adopt a “good enough” attitude after a few successful tests and move on to the next IT challenge or more prominent issue. Only a small percentage of companies will seek continued improvement in their disaster recovery program until it reaches a point where the level of recovery capability becomes predictable and highly reliable. These various degrees of this evolution can be described as the disaster recovery planning maturity level.
See Evaluating your disaster recovery program’s maturity level by Pierre Dorion, compliments of SearchDisasterRecovery.com (registration required).
