Helmuth Von Moltke was a Prussian general and military theorist who followed in the footsteps of Carl von Clausewitz (as an aside, if you can invest the time, reading "On War" is a powerful experience).
One of his famous aphorisms was:
"No plan survives contact with the enemy"
Erwin Schrödinger created the thought experiment that took his name - Schrödinger's Cat
Until you look in the box the cat is neither alive nor dead but in a quantum superposition of both alive and dead.
So - combine these two concepts with FIX, Electronic Trading and Disaster Recovery and what do you get? Some rather tortured mixed metaphors for which the author apologises, but here we go...
No Disaster Recovery plan is actually real unless it faces the enemy and is seen to function. An untested Disaster Recovery plan is very likely to turn out to be a dead cat in a box.
When looking at a DR plan - ask this question:
"When was the plan last executed?"
If the answer is one or more of
- more than a year ago
- before a big application upgrade
- before a hardware refresh
- before an office move
- before a change of personnel running the execution of the DR plan
- before any merger or acquisition
- before any divestment or closure of a business line
Then it's time to run it again and look at what's in the box...
