Disaster Recovery

Technology is the lifeblood of many organizations. In this Internet world, downtime can be catastrophic. Preserving the IT environment means more than just having backups, an alternate site or "the Cloud". It means more than having technical restoration procedures. It means having a framework for managing outages, a strategy based on a complete understanding of the applications, databases, network and infrastructure (and the business!), and a predefined choreography for rallying key technicians, activating the plan, and sequencing the steps.

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Coffee Table Case Study
A market-leading pre-paid credit card processor had dual environments, highly-available or redundant systems, and restoration procedures for many situations. However, they realized that they needed more - they needed the strategy, framework and choreography for cohesively managing a response. Having recently acquired a bank, they also needed the documentation and controls to pass an audit.

ARSC worked with them to establish the overall program:

Develop the methodology, policies, processes and supporting SharePoint site
Inventory and document the systems
Create architecture depictions that were technologically correct yet readable
Articulate the strategy
Create the overall playbook for the management of a catastrophic outage

ARSC also re-engineered the TechOps on-call process using automated Mass Emergency Notification. Their NOC used to look up who was on-call with manually-maintained calendars, make manual phone calls, then give up and call good-old-Bob. The new process is push-button: they send a "get me a systems engineer" request, and the system automatically finds one based on automated schedules and shifts, repeatedly calls, texts and emails, and automatically escalates based on service levels.

ARSC was then asked to assist the Business Continuity department in delivering a turn-key emergency communications system. ARSC defined the message populations, designed the messages to state-of-the-art practice, and simplified/automated message launch. ARSC also customized the system to optimize communications based on message device and company specifics requiring verbiage and acronyms.