Business Continuity Case Studies

Protecting your Data

Introduction

A core pillar of effective Business Continuity Management and Planning is to ensure that the information and the associated processes your organisation needs is available when and where you need it. The diversity of options available illustrates the complexity of the topic and the range of factors that will affect the methodology you choose to protect your information infrastructure.

During the course of the Business Impact Analysis and your Plan Development phases of your BCM planning you should be identifying your critical data and assessing how best to protect and importantly establish the means to recover it in the most effective manner.

Flexibility is a key component here, as the organisation will need to match the online backup and disaster recovery options to the needs of the business. Differentiating between central in-house systems, Distributed networks and other data perhaps stored locally needs an adaptive capability. The backing up to a simple tape unit now rarely fits the needs the needs of the organisation.

Over recent years the increased performance and better value offered by WAN’s and the Internet has opened up the options dramatically giving you far better choice and enabling the capability to better match the range of options needed to manage a 21st Century ICT environment.

Whether you are looking to save costs or increase the levels of service, the flexible options now available gives you far greater control and value than ever before.

Below you will find some case study illustrations of the challenges faced by a number of organisations and how they decided to address the challenges faced.

British Red Cross

The British Red Cross is a non-profit organisation with 222 offices across the United Kingdom. The central office houses the main computer centre, with 80 servers. Two other data centres house the financial systems and call centre systems. Across the remaining remote offices there were a further 70 servers, many more remote offices having only Windows-based PCs.

The Red Cross’ backup infrastructure was becoming increasingly problematic.

Backup at the central office was exceeding the backup window and resulted in long recovery times because the files had to be pieced together from portions of multiple tapes. Backup of all the remote servers and systems were also a significant concern.

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Everton FC

Worlds famous Everton Football Club need to boost its defence and add pace to its game.
Everton Football Club had relied on a tape backup system for its 2 terabytes of files, which include emails and databases for ticketing, merchandising and customer relationship management. But this was unreliable and time-consuming.

“A member of staff had to spend about two hours every morning ensuring the overnight backup had gone okay and that there were no errors,” says Stephen Fell, Head of IT at Everton Football Club. “There was also a security concern because tapes were stored at the office and transferred to another site once a month, making them potentially vulnerable to damage, theft or loss.”

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Continuity Forum Comment

Establishing clear data back-up policies and capabilities to ensure availability of core organisational data is vital to effective Business Continuity planning. Establishing an assessment process to ensure that all the information you need is protected and testing the recovery of data are key to success should you have a data failure event.

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