On-Premise IT DR

Who

A US based manufacturer specializing in providing durable, long lasting, flexible hose and ducting solutions having industrial and commercial applications.

Challenge

• The organization hosts all of its business critical applications in a colocation data center where it owns rack space.
• There was a need to develop failover strategies for these applications after determining their business criticality and recovery precedence.
• A business impact analysis had to be conducted to identify recovery priorities and an alternate site had to be established to failover these applications in the event the organization’s servers in the colocation facility go down.

Solution

• The SIB team of IT consultants conducted a detailed business impact analysis by interviewing departmental heads and identifying each department’s IT dependencies. An inventory of critical servers and applications were compiled along with their recovery time objectives based on the results of the business impact analysis.
• An IT DR site was established at one of the organization’s locations after conducting a feasibility analysis.
• A cloud based service provider was identified for the purpose of maintaining and transferring data backups if data processing had to be shifted to the DR site.
• Once the initial hardware was installed at the DR site, recovery procedures were formulated for each of the servers hosted at the colocation facility.
• A comprehensive IT recovery plan was compiled taking into account the recovery priority of the applications and availability of IT personnel during an outage.
• This plan was uploaded to the SIB software and additional personnel were identified to keep the plan updated in the event of server upgrades or changes.
• A table top training exercise was also conducted by switching data processing to the DR site to ensure recovery procedures mentioned in the IT DR plan were fool proof.