The Shift7 DR Assessment.
Resilience by design, not by accident. We audit your disaster recovery posture, score your readiness, and hand you a plan that actually works.
"We have a DR plan... somewhere. I think it's in SharePoint."
"Our RTO is 4 hours." (For everything? Including the wiki?)
"We tested it... two years ago. It mostly worked."
"Our DR strategy is 'call Mike.' Mike left in March."
"We replicate to a second site. I'm pretty sure it's still running."
"We've never actually failed over. We're afraid to try."
Sound familiar? You're not alone. And it's fixable.
Our Methodology
Three phases. No guesswork.
Every assessment follows the same battle-tested framework — because DR is too important for ad-hoc approaches.
The Assessment
Weeks 1-2
Deep audit of your existing infrastructure, DR plan, replication health, and gaps. Interviews with business stakeholders and IT leadership. RVTools and AWS Config analysis. Full workload inventory.
The Shift
Weeks 3-4
RTO/RPO analysis per application. Workload tiering. Dependency mapping. Runbook development with real resource IDs, real commands, real contacts. Architecture recommendations.
The Evolution
Ongoing
Tabletop exercise facilitation. Partial and full failover testing. Quarterly reviews. Ongoing advisory to keep your DR program current as your environment changes.
Scope
What we assess.
On-Prem Infrastructure
vCenter, vSAN, ESXi hosts, SRM, vSphere Replication, storage arrays, networking, NSX
AWS Cloud Workloads
EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, cross-region replication, backup jobs, CloudFormation and IaC coverage
Security & Certificates
SSL certificate inventory and expiry tracking, firewall rules, IP allowlists, IAM policies, MFA status
Replication & Backup
Replication health and lag times, backup job success rates, RPO actual vs. stated, retention compliance
Dependencies & DNS
Application-to-service-to-database dependency chains, DNS zones, records, TTLs, third-party API dependencies
People & Process
DR ownership clarity, escalation chains and contacts, runbook completeness audit, knowledge gaps
Deliverables
What you walk away with.
Not a generic PDF. Six concrete artifacts your team can use the day they're delivered.
DR Readiness Score
Weighted 0-100 score across 6 domains. Color-coded green, amber, red. Executive-ready summary with narrative context your leadership team can actually understand.
Gap Assessment Report
Every finding documented with severity rating, business impact, remediation steps, effort estimate, and recommended owner. Prioritized so you know what to fix first.
RTO/RPO Matrix
Per-application recovery objectives signed off by business owners. DR strategy recommendation per tier — backup & restore, pilot light, warm standby, or multi-region.
Executable Runbook
Step-by-step failover procedures with real resource IDs, real commands, real contacts. Not theoretical — tested against your actual infrastructure.
DR Companion Workbook
Living spreadsheet covering workload register, replication health tracker, certificate audit, dependency map, and testing log. Your single source of truth for DR.
Testing Cadence Plan
Quarterly tabletop exercises, semi-annual partial failovers, annual full-scale tests. Scheduled and scoped specifically for your environment and team capacity.
Why Shift7
Built by the people who get paged at 2 AM.
Built by practitioners
Not theorists. We've managed DR across 70+ AWS accounts, 26 Kafka clusters, and enterprise VMware environments. We know what breaks because we've been the ones fixing it.
Hybrid fluency
We speak both VMware and AWS fluently. vSAN, SRM, NSX on one side. EC2, RDS, CloudFormation on the other. Most consultancies do one or the other. We do both.
Outcomes, not hours
We measure success by RTO achieved, gaps closed, and tests passed — not billable hours. You get a program that works, not a stack of documents that look impressive but gather dust.
We use what we build
Our own tooling — the RVTools Importer, automated gap scoring, the DR companion workbook — was built in-house and battle-tested on real engagements. You benefit from that investment.
Ready to find out where you actually stand?
Start with a free 30-minute consultation. We'll discuss your environment, your concerns, and whether an assessment makes sense.