FAA NOTAM outage should scare all of us into (finally) testing our DRPs
ONE BAD FILE
The Federal Aviation Administration has confirmed the event was triggered by an employee error that caused a corrupt file in the NOTAM system’s database. Worse, the backup system that would have been used to restore the database also contained the same corrupt file.
This should make IT practitioners cringe – I know I sure did. That’s because the presence of a corrupt backup strongly suggests the FAA’s disaster recovery plan (DRP) had likely not been tested in the leadup to this failure. Because the only way IT leaders would have known they had a problematic backup would...