Olympic champion, you? Don’t worry, that’s not the goal here. You probably know that you don’t have to break records in athletics to get the benefits of basic exercise. Neither do you have to spend every waking hour training in DR to get the dividends of continuing DR education. True, the Disaster Recovery International Institute (DRII) makes repeat examination a condition for continuing to justify DRI certification. However, the work that is needed to stay at a suitable level of expertise can also do you good. And just like exercise, a little of it done regularly and sufficiently often can be enough to net you the two following major advantages.
The first advantage is that you do the right things in disaster recovery. The DRII provides an excellent model to follow for DR planning and execution. It also provides relevant updates to that model as time moves on and DR evolves. While it’s not the only model available, it’s tried and trusted, and proven to keep DR practitioners on the straight and narrow path of competence. Without a model to follow, the danger is of going off at a tangent. The longer the interval since the last time you checked the DRI model or the www.dri-anz.org website, the further off the path you may have wandered.
The second advantage is in then doing those disaster recovery things right. While your industry may be prone to certain kinds of disaster rather than others, the other corner-cases that you identified in your risk analysis can still happen. Periodically reviewing them and the action you would take means you can stay ready to handle them if required. How much effort do you need to put in? It all depends, but to draw on an example from the world of exercise, just regular, well-paced walking can be a major step towards keeping fit. Check out analogous DR educational activities that you can do sufficiently regularly and easily, and you may find your next DRI certification goes a lot better – perhaps even a “walkover”.