When Mayhem Strikes

The importance of having a proven DR plan in place

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    January 12, 2012
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    Aaron J. Courtney
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When I received a call from one of our clients today regarding missing data, I was reminded of that insurance company’s series of commercials where the actor represents the embodiment of mayhem. During the hectic nature of quarter-end reporting and an attempted upgrade (not performed by us) to a very popular report packaging software system, our client witnessed data destruction, in the form of missing quarterly letters, allegedly “eaten” by the packaging software during quarterly report packet assembly.

Continuous Data Replication

What better opportunity to demonstrate the real world effectiveness of our continuous data replication service! Within five minutes of receiving the phone call, I had mounted an image of our client’s affected data drive, taken just a few hours before the incident occurred, replicated on a virtual machine running in our on-site data center which is continuously connected to our client’s office via an IPSec VPN, creating a private cloud infrastructure.

Real World Recovery Time

Not more than two minutes later, all data had been fully restored to our client’s production server accompanied with my recommendation that we perform a series of near term compatibility tests prior to placing the newly updated packaging software system in production. We subsequently squared away the initial incompatibility issue, and our client was able to successfully generate and distribute all quarterly reports.

Although not in the form of a runaway Christmas tree, a malfunctioning GPS device, or a streaking fan, a small amount of mayhem did strike our client’s office this morning. Fortunately, we were able to mitigate the damage by way of a thoughtfully designed disaster recovery plan we executed on behalf of our client.

If you would like to discuss your back office readiness for unexpected mayhem, contact us today for a free consultation!

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