The data synchronization process may affect valuable data and impact systems that are critical to the ongoing mission of your organization. Therefore its implementation should be planned in advance, any risks identified and mitigation plans in place.

The Implementation Plan

A typical implementation plan might include:

• The roles and responsibilities of the implementation team.
• A backup and recovery strategy for any mission-critical data and a redundancy or recovery strategy for systems in the event of critical data loss or system failure during implementation.
• Carefully-reviewed and tested step-by-step processes detailing any necessary software installation, and any operating system, database, or network configuration.
• Verification steps in the process for auditing the results of installation, configuration, or sync operation.
• A data verification / data scrubbing process following the initial sync.
• Any other identified risks and their mitigation plans.
• Standard operating procedures for ensuring the continued operation of the system once deployed.
• Security and privacy policies.
• System Monitoring and Alerting policy.
• Logging policies.
• Auditing policies.