Disaster Recovery

Client

Founded in 1924, our client has been a grantmaking foundation that is dedicated to improving the lives of residents within New York City and its surrounding suburbs. As one of the oldest and largest community foundations, they bring together individuals, families, foundations, and businesses to build a better community. The foundation supports nonprofits that make a difference. By applying knowledge, creativity, and resources to the most challenging issues they ensure meaningful opportunities and a better quality of life is possible for all New Yorkers, today and into the future.

Issue

Our client’s data resided in a singular location in NYC. The risk of considerable harm to the business was considered to be extremely high, as evidenced by events such as 9/11, hurricane Sandy, as well as other natural disasters which are common to the area. Our client wanted to ensure they could protect their business data assets and continue working in the event of a disaster. A reality that included loss of their data, intellectual property, and information provided by their contributors/donors was unacceptable. Such a loss could result in irreparable damage to the business and legal ramifications costing millions to the organization.

Goal

Design and implement a “warm” site that is readily available in the event of a disaster. This site would give employees the ability to continue working if their main IT infrastructure became inaccessible. Users would have the ability to work remotely and maintain business continuity. Their data would need to be secured through several processes and backed up across multiple geographically disparate locations across the country. This would provide them the assurance that no matter what happened their data, systems, and donor information would be safe.

Solution

We crafted a disaster recovery plan (DRP) that was customized to our client’s specific requirements. Additionally, we worked with our client to incorporate our DRP into their broader business continuity plan. We then designed and implemented a DRaaS solution built upon a VMware virtualized platform and utilizing an enterprise-grade backup and recovery system. The backup and recovery solution provided several important features, such as ease of management across the enterprise and significantly reduced storage requirements (and associated costs) due to native compression and deduplication. This solution allows us to recover entire physical machines, VMs, files or folders, and application objects to another physical or virtual machine. Virtual Standby capabilities allowed us to leverage our virtualization platform to provide the required warm site DRP capabilities. As such, the warm site contains servers that are continually updated (virtual standbys), identical to the production servers, and are readily on standby. During a disaster event these servers are activated and become the active site providing access to all users in order to maintain business workflow. The warm site is tested bi annually to ensure proper functionality and disaster readiness. The “warm” site includes the following components: Host/VMWare hypervisor, Domain Controller, File Server, Database server, and Citrix XenApp Application Delivery server.

Result

The client’s worries have been put to rest with assurance that the business is prepared for disaster scenarios. Their data is secured in multiple locations and is quickly accessible if the need arises. Users can work remotely if a disaster strikes and can access their critical business applications, data, and donor information from anywhere with an internet connection. This assurance has provided peace of mind for the client, but more importantly to their donors.

Competencies

VMware, Citrix XenApp (application delivery), Rapid Recovery (advanced backup and offsite replication for disaster recovery), 2 Factor Authentication, Windows Server.