Disaster Recovery planning for a Data Centre Failure

The Brief:
Working for a major global pharmaceutical company, the brief was to assume the complete loss or unavailability of a data centre, and provide disaster recovery solutions for mission critical applications and IT services.

Details of project:
The objective was to deliver DR & Continuity Services in a highly regulated environment spanning across the globe. This enterprise scale environment created unique and in depth challenges. The applications and infrastructure were supporting a full gamut of business processes. In order to provide full end to end Disaster Recovery Planning which would meet business, regulatory, statutory and compliance requirements many analytical and risk management techniques were required. The ongoing & iterative processes required to ascertain application and infrastructure dependencies, and to provide the varied options which met obligations were at times very complex and challenging.

The solutions primarily utilised the industry standard principles of hot, warm & cold standby. These were delivered using various methods including internal, external & trailer/ship to site recovery facilities. In some scenarios high availability replication technologies were employed, which enabled even the most stringent MTPD, RTO’s & RPO’s to be achieved.

Furthermore the solutions involved a number of disparate platforms and architectures, including Mainframe/AS400, Citrix, VM, UNIX, Windows, SAN, and NAS Oracle, & SQL DB’s, involving specialist resources from all aspects of the IT spectrum. All the testing activities had to ensure that there would be no impact on the production environment, & that the production environment was not compromised in any way.

All projects required fully documented requirements analysis, plans and full testing of solution, reconciling the outcome to requirements.