Disaster Recovery Gap Analysis Example
TEST DATE: 5/18/2010‐5/20/2010
Revision 6/11/2010
2010 DISASTER RECOVERY TEST REPORT AND GAP ANALYSIS
The annual disaster recovery test was conducted 5/18‐5/20, 2010 at the IBM Schaumberg BCRS facility. This test sets a new watermark for CU*Answers in our disaster recovery and business continuity efforts as it represents the introduction of the new Muskegon, Michigan, data center into the test’s scope.
Muskegon allows for an entirely new way of thinking about our disaster recovery and business continuity planning and will challenge traditional DR/BC paradigms. We need to start planning our networks and systems deployments in a new way and challenge what features and services are and are not critical to our business.
There is no doubt ItsMe247.com has become a cornerstone of our network and it was time to step up and move this service into a Tier1 recovery level equal with that of the host system. Lately we’ve challenged what belongs in
Tier1, and we will continue to do so every year as we evaluate our network’s products and services. A few years ago, we moved our third party relationships into Tier1 and started an aggressive annual testing schedule. We’ve also begun adding redundancy to third parties at our 28th Street facility. We will continue to evaluate and expect that Tier1 will continue to evolve as driven by business requirements and risk analysis.
This event tested our ability to operate ItsMe247.com from Muskegon connected to a host recovered inside of
IBM’s BCRS network. This is a significant event because for ItsMe to function properly for the member, it has to have roughly equivalent capacity to the production web site. So we layered in load balancing, redundant web servers, and following our HA system strategy, a database server identical to production.
At the IBM BCRS facility we recovered the host and established a VPN connection to Muskegon so the ItsMe servers could communicate securely with the host.
Revision 6/11/2010
2010 DISASTER RECOVERY TEST REPORT AND GAP ANALYSIS
The annual disaster recovery test was conducted 5/18‐5/20, 2010 at the IBM Schaumberg BCRS facility. This test sets a new watermark for CU*Answers in our disaster recovery and business continuity efforts as it represents the introduction of the new Muskegon, Michigan, data center into the test’s scope.
Muskegon allows for an entirely new way of thinking about our disaster recovery and business continuity planning and will challenge traditional DR/BC paradigms. We need to start planning our networks and systems deployments in a new way and challenge what features and services are and are not critical to our business.
There is no doubt ItsMe247.com has become a cornerstone of our network and it was time to step up and move this service into a Tier1 recovery level equal with that of the host system. Lately we’ve challenged what belongs in
Tier1, and we will continue to do so every year as we evaluate our network’s products and services. A few years ago, we moved our third party relationships into Tier1 and started an aggressive annual testing schedule. We’ve also begun adding redundancy to third parties at our 28th Street facility. We will continue to evaluate and expect that Tier1 will continue to evolve as driven by business requirements and risk analysis.
This event tested our ability to operate ItsMe247.com from Muskegon connected to a host recovered inside of
IBM’s BCRS network. This is a significant event because for ItsMe to function properly for the member, it has to have roughly equivalent capacity to the production web site. So we layered in load balancing, redundant web servers, and following our HA system strategy, a database server identical to production.
At the IBM BCRS facility we recovered the host and established a VPN connection to Muskegon so the ItsMe servers could communicate securely with the host.