Jason, myself, Dan Boyer, John McKusker, and
Nancy Ollinger began having meetings, going to
conferences, and reading materials covering the
topic of business continuity. Since 9/11, this
has become an industry in and of itself. Some
of the reading was enough to keep you awake at
night. As a group we were able to identify our
greatest threats and came up with a game plan to
go about correcting them. While IT was not the
only component of that threat matrix, it was by
far the biggest. By June of last year it was
decided that we should go about proposing a
secondary site for our corporate operations in
the event of a “disaster.” There is a multitude
of ways to do this, so without boring you, I’ll
just say that we took the benefits of many of
those methodologies and rolled them into a plan
for the building that you can see today.
This building now houses our server farm and
also data backup for our remote sites. Every
night data from our offices all over the state
flows into a data vault here in Brooklyn. Our
servers locally also replicate to that vault.
Once that process is complete the data vault
replicates itself to a secondary vault in
another location. Without divulging too many
secrets I can say that as a user your files
exist in 3 different places and that two of
those locations are at least 60 miles apart for
each office.
If one of our remote sites or subsidiaries were
unable to do business in their current offices
they could move to this building and operate.
We have their data. If our office here in
Brooklyn were unusable we could operate here as
well. Even if the IT Building sustained some
catastrophic event we could crack the bunker
open and move the machines to another location
without much downtime. The flexibility or our
new backup approach and the spatial coverage of
our company allow us many options. That spatial
coverage has gone from being a liability (in
terms of data management) to an asset.
A secondary benefit to the construction of this
building has been the added space for John and
I. Our quarters in the main office were
cramped, to say the least. We now have the
storage room and bench space to more comfortably
support our workload, not to mention the room
for continued growth.
Business Continuity is not a project that is
ever complete. As our company and methods
change we’ll have to adjust our planning
accordingly. Factoring that into our plans,
though, only makes for a better solution in the
end. |
