In the event of a business critical disaster the following steps are essential to make a formal Root Cause Analysis (RCA) succeed:

1. Start preparing for a Root Cause Analysis at the time of the disaster.
2. In case of a Microsoft CritSit ask the Microsoft Support Professionals that you would like to have a formal Root Cause Analysis performed later (after recovering from the disaster) as part of a new service request and have them compile a list of suitable data gathering tools to be run.
3. Make sure your IT business processes are aligned to your planned root cause analysis  – once the decision to perform an RCA has been made, all “cleaning” processes (eg. the number of days after which diagnostic logs are automatically deleted in SharePoint) have to be paused – this also includes the number of days after which SQL backups are deleted.
4. Allocate time and resources for the RCA as soon as you have recovered from the disaster. Don’t delay this task. The sooner the RCA is performed the more likely the exact root cause will be determined.