Action for Blind People takes on board Disaster Recovery
For Action for Blind People, availability of their main business applications is critical to enable a high quality of service to their blind and partially sighted clients.
‘Action is reliant on IT systems across the organisation,’says Jacquie Wakeford, ‘Any outage impacts productivity and often means that people simply can’t work at all.’
After a server hardware failure which meant that the Finance team had no system for several days, Wakeford made business continuity a very high priority. ‘We looked at an inhouse solution but had to
reject it because of high investment cost and the difficulty in maintaining yet another IT environment on
another site. And the standard syndicated disaster recovery services are very expensive,’ says Wakeford.
‘I did a full risk assessment, agreed requirements with the business managers and then looked around for options that would meet our needs and, importantly, that I felt I could get funding agreed for.’
The solution that met both criteria was provided by a company specialising in business continuity and hosted DR solutions, Newton IT. ‘We now have a hosted service from Newton IT for our six most critical systems, with scheduled data replication and a tight SLA for each backup system to be brought online on invocation. My business managers are now confident of high availability and we have the main systems ready to go in a DR scenario,’ concludes Wakeford.
‘Leased kit meant a small initial outlay and operational costs are very reasonable. And annual failover testing is part of the contract – an essential requirement. Thanks to Newton IT, I now have one less problem to worry about!’
This approach helps the charity to manage the recovery from other incidents such as virus infestations and unstable upgrades.
It is the approach of choice for highly-regulated organisations such as in the City where large organisations will have the choice of at least one other site from which they can switch operations at the flick of a switch.
So, how does this solution work? And how does this provide immediate fail over, causing minimum end user disruption?
Looking at the diagram above we have a typical client environment in the blue box below, The blue box above represents our client’s replicated environment at our Disaster Recovery Centre.
Here we show a one to one disaster recovery service. Depending on the criticality of each server’s data, a mixture data, a mixture of real-time or scheduled replication can be chosen.
The purpose off this set-up is to have a replica environment so that in the event of a disaster, i.e. If the client server fails, all users will automatically switch over to the replica environment, seamlessly.
Alternatively, IT managers have the power to manually execute the switch over.
When the faulty server is repaired and brought back on line, then replication begins back to your site from your backup servers at our site. When both sets are back in step then you can switch back to normal operations with no effect on your users.
However, no matter how clever the technology, BCP and DR are not instant solutions to the problem of risk management. They require long-term attention to the difficult business of staying in business. Like the emergency repair at the roadside, the short-term fix might get you back on back on your feet, but only long term—dedicated attention to keeping your charity’s immune system healthy will keep it out of intensive
care Says Wakeford.
By Jacquie Wakeford, Head of ICT at Action for Blind People
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