Jason Buffington .com

Orchestration is the hero for IT resilience!  Here are 4 reasons why orchestrated workflows are needed for every IT resilience scenario that requires speed or scale.

video transcript

Few weeks ago, I highlighted a product announcement around recovery orchestration. It wasn’t because no one else had done D/R or cyber orchestration before. It was because orchestration in general does not get enough credit in resilience initiatives.

• Orchestration makes recovery faster, because it eliminates all the time of humans clicking the mouse or typing commands we’re looking up settings — all the manual minutia.
• Orchestration reduces human dependencies. Instead of relying on smart humans to be available and focused during recovery, ask those same smart humans to code, document, and test orchestrated workflows in advance … so that if the human isn’t there on your worst day, you can click that button and still leverage their expertise.
• Orchestration improves consistency, because humans are not good at consistent minutia. If there are 12 steps to recovering a workload & you have 80 workloads to recover, I guarantee that the humans will miss some of those 960 steps along the way. Instead, code those 80 workflows, so that a human or an upstream orchestrator can invoke them.
• Orchestration improves testing. If testing is hard or labor intensive, you’re less likely to do it and certainly won’t test as rigorously. But if testing is automated or simply a series of easy buttons, then those workflows get tested the same way each time and tested more often. That means your testing success rate should increase with each test, because you’ll see which workflows consistently work – and you can focus on improving those that don’t yet.

In IT DR, you eventually get to a state where the only difference between testing and reliable recovery is: testing happens in a sandbox on Wednesday afternoons and recoveries happen first thing Monday right after the crisis occurs.

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