Tech planning for a minor disaster
Published: 26 Nov 2007 17:13 GMT
...other communications and storage technologies also contributed significantly. "We have an MPLS-based wide area network managed by Cable & Wireless and also use technology from Network Appliance that means we can easily 'snap-mirror' all our data from our regional sites to one node," said Taylor.
That node is physically located in the main London data centre of business-continuity specialist SunGard, which also acts as the firm's main disaster-recovery partner. Staff on that June day were being sent to a SunGard facility, just one, in fact, of a national network of sites available in the event that trouble strikes one of Irwin Mitchell's operations. For example, there are provisions which come into play in a Leicester SunGard office if trouble strikes the Birmingham centre, and so on.
So, although it wasn't until the afternoon that the formal invocation of the company's business-continuity resource took place, the foundations were there already. Undoubtedly, this was a good thing, as, ultimately, some £2m worth of damage was sustained by the building, and the waterlogged ground floor is still being made good months later.
So technology was a big factor in the company's robust response to the disruption of its physical environment. By 1am the next morning, two recovery suites had been made available, with 100 PCs and 30 IP phones. All the desktops of Irwin Mitchell's call-centre staff had been mirrored so they had exactly the same information on screen when they came in. By 4am, Irwin Mitchell had access to 100 call-centre positions, each of which was identical to those in its own offices.
But, as Thomas's colleague, Sloane, said, in many ways the overall business plan was just as important as technology for dealing with the crisis. "People issues were a definite factor. We had the communications but we needed to reassure people, get them back on track, physically get them moved and deal with the logistics — get people fed and accommodated at the new site, for example. The lesson I think is that it has to be a partnership between the IT side and the people side, and team spirit was very central to getting us back to work as quickly and efficiently as we did."
The immediate crisis, then, had been dealt with. Irwin Mitchell claimed it did not miss a single one of its customer service-level agreements, thanks to its business-continuity plan. There were power issues at the company for another week and a half, said Thomas, but things settled back down and, while repairs are not complete, the company's business was — in the way all good business-continuity managers like — not materially affected by the summer floods.
But, being a good business-continuity manager, Sloane wasn't completely satisfied with the response to the emergency. "We were pleased things worked but we also saw shortcomings and we want to fix them, as well as keeping things up-to-date. You must never be complacent." To this end, the company is committing to working towards the emerging BS 25999 British Standard for business-continuity management. "This not only provides a best-practice structure, it has some very good tests and exercises guidance."
Sloane has heard that the document outlining the standard is the most downloaded document in British Standards' history — and he was not surprised to hear it. "Clients are increasingly asking for this and we think it will quickly become an expected way of doing business to be accredited to this level," he said.
Dovetailing with the organisational interest in BS 25999 is Thomas's continuing work on getting more out of technology. "We are always looking at ways of improving things and I see virtualisation as probably our next big focus area. This will have two benefits: we will be moving our environmental policy forward by having a more concentrated server operation, but it will also have business-continuity benefits. By having a more portable server environment, we can reduce not just our recovery point objective but recovery time can be improved too."
While the environment continues to be unpredictable, responsible IT leaders undeniably need to be as clued up as possible on business continuity. However, getting the right technology base in place also seems to be key to a — forgive the pun — watertight policy.
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