Are you prepared for the departure of a key technical resource in your operation?  Someone who holds the infamous “keys to the kingdom?”   Typically there is a least one person on a company’s IT staff who achieves deity status in regards to physical and logical access. Sometimes key skills also reside in just that one person. If such a person leaves, either voluntarily or involuntarily, how would your critical operations fare?

Now would be a good time to take a fresh look at both your internal documentation and your skills matrix. Things to consider:

1. Are all sysadmin userids and passwords documented somewhere, somehow?
2. Are all critical architectures documented in excruciating detail?  (SAN, virtualization, LAN/WAN, disk replication, backup/restore systems). You want to see how things are connected and how they are intended to interact. You want to see things like IP addresses, subnet addressing schemes, WWN numbers, hard and soft zoning information and the like. You’ll know you have all of the information you need when you can hand it to a new engineer and he doesn’t have any questions. Seem impossible? Strive for it, and the result will be good enough.
3. Where does the above documentation live if you do already have it?  Hopefully it’s not on your staff’s laptops.  If you think you already have it in a shared on-line space, are you sure you have all of it?  And is it being backed up?
4. Do you have runbooks for all of your servers?  Are they current?  Where are they? Are they backed up?
5. How many people have practical working knowledge in each area of your critical infrastructure?  Do you have more than one VMWare tech?  More than one SAN person?  How about Active Directory or Exchange? Ideally you’ll want three in each area. Contract for it if you need to.

 
I could go on, but I think you’re getting my point. This process is somewhat like writing a will.  It’s a real drag to write up, and everybody knows that they need to take care it, but yet it often gets ignored until it’s too late. And just like a will, all of this documentation needs to be updated on a regular basis or it may end up being worthless at crisis time.

Alternatively, you could move the responsibility for a large portion of this to a professional hosting facility.   Why not limit your exposure to just your applications and let us worry about how all the  plumbing is hooked up?

//spk

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Tags: disaster planning, documentation