When we say “voice-activated” disaster recovery, we don’t mean shouting at your support team!
Our vision is about putting together technology that exists today, in a way that would allow you to speak to your system and tell it to recover itself automatically.
Of course, if you prefer a system that does its DR even before you see there’s a problem, this is possible too.
However, even in this highly automated age, human judgment and decision still play a part. Here’s a shopping list of the components you’ll need.
First, a recovery system that you can activate programmatically.
That means an application programming interface (API) through which you can call different functions.
Examples that are commercially available today include cloud recovery systems offering function calls to list resources, list disaster recovery actions available for a given resource, and execute a given DR action for a given resource.
Next, you’ll need an application with appropriate logic to decide when to call which function, and what to do according to the information returned. Calls can be triggered according to the status of your systems.
Systems that no longer respond are a simple example. By integrating data analytics, you can also detect systems that are tending towards unscheduled downtime.
As patterns are recognised and thresholds are approached, your application can use the conclusions from the data analytics to decide if recovery is essential now, or if it can reasonably wait until a window becomes available out of normal business hours, for example.
Finally, add in voice recognition, as in a device or interface for natural language processing (NLP). Some business systems already use devices like the Echo from Amazon to listen to and speak with humans.
The spoken input, which can be in normal, everyday English (or other languages), is then interpreted by “chatbots” and converted into programmatic actions to drive the backend system.
While assembling a complete system from these pieces still requires time and effort, think of how it will feel to be able to just call out “Hey, System, Disaster Recovery, Now!”