It’s 10 o’clock, Do you know where your DR plan is? Part 5 - Beyond Disaster Recovery
by Brian McGinty.
Part 5 – Beyond Disaster Recovery, in our 5-part series on ways to get your Disaster Recovery Plan back on track.
Benefits of Using TransitionManager in Other Areas of Your Organization.
My previous posts in this series have covered some of the ways that TransitionManager (TM) can transform your Disaster Recovery program. Today I want to touch on other areas of your organization that will benefit from the implementation of TransitionManager, such as architecture governance, application portfolio management, licensing management, and individual application support. Since TM has a robust security interface, you can manage access and level of access to data for people and groups.
Here are some of the other areas that can benefit from TransitionManager and its availability to different groups:
Architecture Review and Management
Your architecture team needs to know not just what applications are out there, but also the specifics around the architecture used to support them. This information is available in TransitionManager and can be presented in a graphical format that can be easily modified to look at all, or just specific parts of an application architecture.
Change Control
Understanding the impact of changes to infrastructure or an application can sometimes be daunting. By giving members of the change board access to view TM data, they can go into TM and view data detail, or architecture diagrams, at will. It will give additional confidence and understanding around changes and avoid the holdup of getting questions answered from one or two people who are never in the room when you need them.
Application Portfolio Management
If you are responsible for understanding the big picture on the business applications in your enterprise, you may rely on multiple inputs and the kindness of other groups to provide you with the information you need. With a login to TransitionManager, you can see the big picture on demand. In addition, you know this information is being used by other areas to support Disaster Recovery. You can now present a complete picture of the enterprise and its component makeup.
Application Management and Support
While your business applications are busy managing, growing, and developing, they are not always able to do a good job of documenting everything about their environment. Partnering with the DR organization they now can use TransitionManager to document their environments. In addition, when it comes to understanding how their application fits into Disaster Recovery scenarios, TransitionManager will hold their specific DR runbook plans.
Licensing
Are you ready for your next audit from Microsoft or Oracle on your database consumption? Are you being overcharged for your current license use with a vendor? Usually these are questions that are ignored until senior level management decides they need to know this – like yesterday; and then the fire drill begins. With the DR data set in TransitionManager, you now can make the necessary queries and provide solid answers – in a timely manner without hair on fire.
While TransitionManager is the answer to building a world class Disaster Recover program, it is also many times worth collaborating and sharing the benefits with other areas of your organization. When you can demonstrate positive impacts to areas outside of your initial focus, it can make the difference between someone just trying to get another tool in the house, and someone working to help the organization.
Part 1: It’s 10 o’clock, Do You Know Where Your DR Plan Is? Where to Start
Part 2: It’s 10 o’clock, Do you know where your DR plan is? Part 2 – The Data Sources
Part 3: It’s 10 o’clock, Do you know where your DR plan is? Part 3 – Data Viewing
Ready to see how TransitionManager can improve your migration process?
