When an IT outage occurs, it’s crunch time, and you need to get your applications and systems back online as quickly as possible to minimize disruption and data loss. Using your IT disaster recovery plan during a live outage without a dry run or rehearsal is a recipe for disaster. And, with enterprises experiencing both an increase in IT outages and prolonged recovery times, your IT outage recovery strategy needs to be precise, tested and reliable. This is where planned failover becomes critical.
In this article, we overview the importance of planned IT failovers and failover testing plans, and how automated runbooks help accelerate recovery.
What is a planned failover and why is it essential for IT recovery?
A planned failover is the process of switching an application from a primary to a secondary (standby) location, following the outlined procedures and technical documentation. Unlike an unplanned or emergency failover, a planned failover is a rehearsal exercise used to test the effectiveness of the recovery plan.
It’s important because it transforms theoretical IT disaster recovery plans into practical, executable procedures, reducing the risk of unexpected issues during an actual incident. Running a planned failover allows teams to validate each step of the recovery process, uncover weaknesses in the current setup, and improve coordination across systems and teams
What are the typical scenarios of a planned failover event?
The controlled and proactive planned failover process for IT disaster recovery is often used in the following situations:
- Scheduled maintenance: To upgrade hardware, apply patches, or perform other maintenance on the primary system without causing downtime for users.
- Disaster avoidance: If an impending natural disaster or major event is anticipated at the primary site, a planned failover can preemptively move operations to a safer location.
- Disaster recovery testing and validation: To regularly test plans and ensure that the failover mechanisms and the redundant environment function as expected, often without disrupting production services. This often includes load balancing and performance testing.
- Data center migration: To smoothly transition an application from one data center to another.
How planned failover helps speed up IT recovery
By flexing your IT disaster recovery muscles through planned failover events, your organization will be better prepared when an actual failover is required. Essentially, you’re taking the theoretical IT disaster recovery plan and transforming it into a realistic and well-rehearsed procedure.
Best practices for a successful planned failover strategy
For recovery after an IT outage hits, you need to trust that your plans will work. Here are some best practices to ensure your planned failover strategy can support you effectively.
Automated runbooks for failover processes
It starts with detailed disaster recovery documentation. By transforming IT disaster recovery plans into automated runbooks, you transition from static documents and error-prone processes to streamlined, efficient, and reliable failovers. Automated runbooks can execute multiple tasks simultaneously, when dependencies allow for it, reducing failover time significantly.
Streamlined communication and notifications
Whether it’s a live disaster event or a planned failover exercise, it’s critical for all teams to have continual communication and stay aligned on the current status. Even though it’s a controlled exercise, communication significantly contributes to the efficiency, accuracy, and overall success of the failover test and, therefore, the effectiveness of your real disaster recovery plan.
A failover exercise often involves multiple teams—sometimes hundreds of people—including those responsible for servers, networks, applications, database administration, security, and even executives. By integrating automated runbooks with communications platforms such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, you can keep teams informed of status updates with instant notifications, helping you:
- Ensure everyone understands the current status and what comes next.
- Maintain that alignment across teams (network, server, app, etc.) is synchronized, acting in sequence, and avoiding wasted effort.
- Facilitate immediate issue reporting and quick, accurate escalation for faster resolution.
- Minimize human error and confusion through clear, consistent directives and updates.
- Keep relevant business and IT leadership informed, managing expectations and building confidence.
- Speed up the entire failover process, reducing downtime by ensuring smooth, coordinated execution.
Auditing and post-failover review
Auditing and post-failover review are a critical part of the planned failover process. It turns a test or exercise scenario into a powerful learning experience, which can significantly strengthen your overall IT disaster recovery process and resilience posture.
An auto-generated audit log guarantees precise time-stamping of who did what and when, providing consistent reporting for detailed post-failover analysis. Post-failover reports should provide task-level details so you can pinpoint tasks, milestones, or the user who went over the allotted time to identify areas for improvement.
A regular failover testing schedule
Regularly testing IT disaster recovery plans is crucial to ensure IT resilience. A best practice is to test each failover procedure, by application, at least once per year. However, for more critical business services such as mission-critical applications, semi-annual or even quarterly testing is recommended.
Routine planned failover testing helps reinforce readiness and exposes any gaps before they become major issues.
Leverage AI to accelerate failovers
Once you’ve implemented the other best practices listed, artificial intelligence (AI) is a great way to optimize and accelerate the failover process. It can rapidly generate instant runbooks from structured and unstructured data sources, creating a blueprint for recovery in minutes, rather than hours. Furthermore, AI can summarize lengthy runbook descriptions into concise, actionable insights, enabling teams to quickly grasp the essence of complex procedures during high-pressure situations.
Critically, AI continually analyzes past failover attempts and current system states to suggest intelligent improvements to runbooks, proactively identifying bottlenecks, recommending optimal task sequences, and even predicting potential points of failure, thereby continuously refining and hardening the recovery process.
The impact of planned failover on long-term IT resilience
Through regular testing and continuous improvement of IT disaster recovery processes, you set your organization up for long-term application resilience. A mature planned failover strategy reduces downtime, improves confidence, and ensures continuity, even when unexpected disruptions occur.
How Cutover runbooks support planned failover scenarios
These best practices help provide a foundational approach to failovers and disaster recovery. Cutover’s AI-powered automated runbooks help standardize and accelerate IT disaster recovery. From data center failover testing to live multi-region cloud disaster recovery, Cutover provides a platform to:
- Store your automated runbooks in a central repository
- Standardize failover plans with automated runbook templates
- Automate manual tasks via the API and integrations
- Leverage Cutover AI to create, summarize, and get intelligent suggestions for failover runbooks
- Ensure regulatory compliance with post-event reporting and the immutable audit log
Get started on streamlining your planned failovers with Cutover - book a demo today!