Disaster Recovery Planning - a case study

The scenario; IT disaster

It’s Thursday morning, your busiest day of the week. You have thousands of payroll clients to process; they must be done TODAY, no question!

Suddenly the power to your building fails; someone has dug through the main power supply to your business area. The run time on your UPS has been exhausted so your Business critical server has now powered itself down. The server is dead so you can’t get any information off it and your customers are expecting their payroll details shortly.

This is exactly the situation one of our customers found themselves in recently and the disaster recovery plan we implemented rescued the situation and they were running from a 2nd site within 2 hours with up-to-date information.

How did we manage to get him running so quickly?

By implementing a detailed Disaster Recovery (D.R.) plan

The planning was a joint effort between us and the customer. We discussed his concerns for business continuity in a disaster situation and his exposure to risk Risks identified as realistic and/or probable were included in the D.R. plan. Issues like;

Server hardware failure
Data corruption
Data loss
Virus attacks
Serious IT network failure
Internet access failure
Loss of power to the business premises
Loss of access to the business premises
A total loss of the business premises

Our customer was serious about his DR planning and realised its pivotal importance for his business continuity. We put a solution together which addressed all the issues identified and under his budget!

The DR plan included the following;

Replica “backup” server installed and configured running at a 2nd site
Both servers had built in redundancy for drives and power
A 30 min run time UPS solution
Regular managed data backup to hard drive
Remote management console on the server so we can monitor critical conditions

When this call came in one of our engineers who was familiar with the customer, his site and the DR plan made the necessary IT configuration changes straight away. He liaised with the customer and his ISP to make sure everything was sorted out from start to finish.

Our customer was really happy with the way the DR plan worked and sees his investment as a really smart move, “It’s paid for itself already”.

Disaster recovery testimonial