<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none;" alt="" src="https://px.ads.linkedin.com/collect/?pid=1110556&amp;fmt=gif">
Skip to content
Meet Our Experts Customize My Content Contact Us
      September 2, 2025

      Your Network Disaster Recovery Plan is Only as Good as its Execution

      Your DR plan tells you what to do. Network configuration management ensures you can actually do it.

      5 min read

      Written by: Yann Guernion
      Key Takeaways
      • Learn how the success of any disaster recovery plan (DRP) hinges on effective execution.
      • See how the reliance on manual processes poses the greatest risk to fast, precise disaster recovery efforts.
      • Leverage network configuration management (NCM) to ensure your DRP is executed effectively.

      A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is the strategic backbone of your organization’s resilience. It defines your objectives, outlines responsibilities, and sets the critical promise you make to the business: your recovery time objective (RTO). This plan is indispensable. However, a strategy is worthless without the tactical ability to implement it. In the heat of a crisis, the success or failure of your recovery doesn't hinge on the plan itself, but on your team's ability to execute it with speed and precision. This is where most recoveries falter—in the critical gap between knowing what to do and actually being able to do it.

      The chasm between plan and reality

      When a network outage strikes, your DRP provides the blueprint for recovery. But what happens when that blueprint describes a network that no longer exists? Your network is dynamic, with configurations changing daily. Your recovery plan, however, isn't. This creates the first execution challenge: your team is forced to work with outdated information, trying to apply instructions that may no longer be relevant. This disconnect between the plan's assumptions and the network's reality is a primary source of delay and failure.

      The second challenge lies in the execution itself, and it is a distinctly human one. A typical plan might contain a step like, "The network engineer will restore the last known-good configuration." This simple sentence hides a mountain of risk. It's a strategy that assumes perfect human performance under the worst possible conditions. This isn't just a hypothetical problem; it's a recognized industry-wide crisis. A recent IDC study highlighted that two of the top three challenges in executing disaster recovery are "IT personnel time and resource availability" and "IT personnel knowledge/skill." This data confirms the dangerous reality: your recovery hinges on having the right person with the right knowledge available at the exact moment of chaos. This reliance on manual processes is fundamentally fragile.

      The engine that brings your plan to life

      You don't need a better plan; you need to bridge the gap between your existing plan and its real-world execution. This is where network configuration management (NCM) becomes a critical capability. This isn't a replacement for your DRP; it provides the execution engine that makes your DRP achievable.

      First, NCM ensures your team is always working from an accurate blueprint. By automatically backing up and versioning every configuration change across your network, NCM provides a perpetually current, single source of truth. When an incident occurs, the step in your plan is no longer "find the right backup," because NCM has it ready. This instantly eliminates guesswork and wasted time, allowing your team to execute the plan with data they can trust.

      More importantly, NCM automates the most fragile part of the execution. It replaces the risky, manual process of CLI restoration with a controlled, reliable, "click-to-restore" function. This transforms the plan's most vulnerable step into its most dependable one. NCM ensures that the recovery action is performed correctly every time, regardless of who is performing it or how much pressure they are under. By doing so, NCM drastically reduces the time and risk involved, making your RTO a realistic target rather than a hopeful guess.

      Conclusion

      Your DRP sets the destination. But the journey of recovery is fraught with peril. A plan without a powerful execution engine is like having a map without a vehicle. By integrating NCM into your recovery strategy, you give your plan the execution power it needs to succeed. NCM can help you ensure that when disaster strikes, your team can execute with the confidence, speed, and precision required.

      Transforming your disaster recovery from a paper plan into a reliable, automated process is a foundational step in building true organizational resilience. To dive deeper into the strategies and best practices that make this possible, explore our Mastering Network Configuration Management eBook. This eBook provides a comprehensive guide that offers key insights into how you can establish critical NCM capabilities in your organization.

      Tag(s): DX NetOps , Network Monitoring , Network Observability , Network Automation , Network Management , Network Configuration Management , NCM , DRP , Disaster Recovery

      Yann Guernion

      Yann has several decades of experience in the software industry, from development to operations to marketing of enterprise solutions. He helps Broadcom deliver market-leading solutions with a focus on Network Management.

      Other Network Observability resources you might be interested in

      icon
      Blog September 23, 2025

      What's New in AutoSys 24.1: Built for the Modern Automation Landscape

      See how AutoSys 24.1 is designed to streamline your daily tasks, accelerate troubleshooting, and simplify how you integrate with the latest technologies.

      Read Blog
      icon
      Office Hours September 23, 2025

      Rally Office Hours: September 18, 2025

      In the latest edition of Rally office hours, learn about changes to the Progress Views widget and then follow the weekly Q&A session with Rally product experts.

      View Recording
      icon
      Video September 23, 2025

      Automic Automation Cloud Integrations: Google Cloud Batch Agent Integration

      See how Broadcom's Google Cloud Batch Automation Agent makes it easy to schedule, queue, and execute batch processing workloads on Google Cloud resources.

      Watch Video
      icon
      Blog September 19, 2025

      Why Has Network Management Missed Its Own Revolution?

      Every major IT revolution was powered by the network. It's time for network management it to have its own revolution.

      Read Blog
      icon
      Course September 17, 2025

      DX NetOps: Harness Syslog for Operational Visibility

      Learn how to configure DX NetOps for robust syslog ingestion, gaining comprehensive operational visibility by displaying all external syslog messages directly within DX NetOps Portal.

      Go to Training
      icon
      Office Hours September 17, 2025

      Rally Office Hours: September 4, 2025

      In the latest edition of Rally office hours, learn how to view filter substitutions and then follow the weekly Q&A session with Rally product experts.

      View Recording
      icon
      Office Hours September 17, 2025

      Rally Office Hours: September 11, 2025

      Hear about recruiting MCP Server early adopters and ancestor filtering in Rally's Custom Lists, then follow the weekly Q&A session with Rally product experts.

      View Recording
      icon
      Course September 17, 2025

      AAI - Searching for and Filtering Jobs

      This course gives you the tools to quickly locate jobs, cut through large volumes of data, and isolate the ones that impact workload performance.

      Go to Training
      icon
      Blog September 16, 2025

      Powering RAG Pipelines With Automic Automation

      See how Automic Automation optimally equips you for the AI revolution, combining proven enterprise capabilities with the potential of generative AI.

      Read Blog