Annual review and live DR exercise

A 1-2 day comprehensive review each year.

Before you start

Block two consecutive days and reserve the DR site for the whole window. Have the year’s incident log, the current reference architecture diagram, the hardware asset register with warranty end dates, an export of admin accounts and roles, and the subscription and capital spend figures open before the first item is read. An item that sends somebody away to find a document is what turns a two-day review into a two-week one.

Order of work

The items run in three phases and the frontmatter list is in that order.

The drill comes first. full-dr-drill owns most of day one because it is the only item that produces evidence rather than opinion, and every judgement after it is made in the light of what the drill exposed. Run it against the real off-site copy, not a local snapshot, and time each stage so the measured recovery time can be compared with the one the business was promised.

architecture-review, security-audit and hardware-lifecycle are the assessment phase: three separate readings of whether the platform as built still matches what is now asked of it, in design, in exposure, and in the age of the metal underneath.

pve-version-review, runbook-refresh, team-training and budget-review are the planning phase, and they close the loop. Each one exists to turn a finding from the first two phases into work with an owner and a date, rather than a note in a document nobody opens until next year.

Output

The review is finished when every item is checked and each finding carries an owner, a target date and a line in next year’s budget. An unchecked critical item means the DR exercise did not complete; record where it stopped and re-run it inside the quarter instead of waiting another year.