Transcript
But I think we wanted to start with the preparation. Because Ray, I think in your experience working with customers, so much of what makes recovery successful in these crisis situations comes down to the preparation. Why don't you break down why clean recovery is all part of that muscle memory? I think a huge component of it is we have to remember, it's people, process, and technology. Because a lot of times when we're thinking about recovery, we're hyper-focused on the technology components of backup and restoration capabilities and so forth. That's critical, that's huge, and having the right solution in that place is going to be pass or fail, that's going to be an important keystone. But the people and process side of the house is where a lot of organizations struggle because they haven't gone through is our plan reflective of what we would actually do in the course of an event? Is everyone aware of the plan that we actually have in place? How do we escalate, how do we communicate, and how do we operate? You want to assemble that before an event. That's the last time, you don't want to assemble it during, you want to execute during the event itself. Being able to work through those motions, those mechanics in peacetime, identify those gaps and opportunities, that's a critical piece of it because the reality is, you will always have to account for different event-specific nuances and pivots. But having that foundational muscle memory established, so you at least have a north star to work towards, really does determine the difference between a optimal outcome and a less than optimal one. I think that muscle memory piece is key too, because it implies repetition, practice, dealing with the failures that come from that. For anyone who's played sports, for anyone who has done anything creative or team-based, I think a lot of that repetition and dealing with the failure is key to that end. I really would love to hear from you guys in the audience, and we are streaming from many different platforms, but we've got a production team that's watching, all the different comment boxes. So please let us know any questions you have, if you want to fight me on The Last Jedi, please. I love picking a fight. But in particular, I do want to hear from you guys, which part of your recovery playbook could use more reps? That repetition is key. So should it be running full tabletop exercises, practicing escalation paths, verifying last known good copies? We're going to talk about that a little bit later. Aligning with security and legal. Those are sometimes black box organizations that we don't spend enough time with. Or honestly, is it all of the above? Which I have a feeling it's all the above. Ray, I'm looking at your face, and I think from your customer experience, it's probably all the above. I would personally choose E, but I think another thing too, beyond the polling question, I would love to hear from, how often should some of these things happen? Because a lot of times we get into this annual kind of cadence in a trap, but is that enough for organizations? And I would argue it may not be, so. And I think it's hard to really, we were having a debrief yesterday with one of our directors of systems engineering who executed a disaster, I'm sorry, a data resilience maturity workshop, which we'll talk about a bit later. And a funny story of that is that they couldn't get all the folks in the room because they were actually running a TTX tabletop exercise in another conference room. So I share that anecdote to say it's kind of funny because I do think that there's this idea of trying to get the right people in the room, the right people who maybe have the altitude perspective, but then also a breadth of experience. It's really tough to get everyone on the same page. So later in the show, we're going to talk about some talking points that you might be able to bring to your organization to make this more of a time priority. Because Ray, in your experience, when you've looked at organizations that are ready for the worst to happen, how often would you say that they run these kinds of exercises? Well, I think in general, we have to kind of break this up a little bit. I think there's typically a once a year tabletop that's holistic across the organization because you're hurting a lot of cats at that time. And time is probably the most critical resource when you think about putting these things together. As you mentioned, a lot of things are happening in parallel and timing of how the business is operating. But I think what I find with more impact is often those kind of micro events, right? Taking every opportunity, an incident, an outage, whatever it is, as another opportunity to run through the needful, to run through the paths of escalation, to do the things that are in the plan and identify opportunities for improvement. So I think it's a combination of don't let a good incident go to waste, doing the annual full-scale exercises, but also in between that, finding times for just the smaller team to maybe look at their portion or these two teams to talk together. And it's a lot easier sometimes to get an hour with two teams about two specific components of a playbook than it is to get three or four hours with the entire executive team trying to work through all the mechanics.
