Banking on business continuity
17
Premier Asset Management needed to implement a complete business
1-2-1 KE
continuity strategy that would meet the company’s recovery objectives
around its critical business applications and data; to reduce potential
downtime windows from hours to minutes. SNS-UK talks to Kevin Strange,
Divisional Director of Information Technology at Premier Asset Management.
Premier is one of the largest be about four to five hours, were on the market, and
VIN STRANGE
privately held fund which again was not fast quickly decided that a further
management companies in enough to meet our business criterion for Premier was the
the UK, providing clients with requirements,” said Strange. ability to work effectively over
a range of services around “We therefore chose to look a Wide Area Network (WAN).
funds, investment trusts and at other technologies that While other solutions he
portfolio management. The could shrink these timescales evaluated could provide high
Group manages just over as well as providing a more availability, they would not
£1.3billion assets on behalf of cost-effective way to manage effectively protect the
a range of retail, institutional the back-up process.” business in the case of a full
and private clients. site failure. Strange therefore
Kevin continues:”In the past, chose Double-Take Software’s
The company experienced a we carried out a dail backup data replication products as
rapid expansion in staff from to tape to keep a copy of our the basis for protecting the
30 up to 75 employees during records, data and documents. company’s critical data.
the past five years. As it grew, However, this meant that we
the company was investing would still lose up to 24 “Our requirement was for live
heavily in new servers and hours’ worth of data in the replication of data across to
applications to support its event of a disaster. To restore our second office, which
business. This represented a this from tape, we would have would provide us with faster
challenge for the company’s needed a tape drive and recovery times in the event of
IT team, as any incident of servers to restore to, whic a disaster,” explained
downtime would affect would have been a huge Strange. “It was extremely
Premier’s ability to serve commitment for us as well as efficient at moving data over
customers. Kevin Strange, taking a long time to recover. the WAN, and could support
divisional director of Ultimately, this is why we our complex requirements.
information technology at looked at Double-Take. While For example, we have some
Premier, recognised the risk we still carry out regular multi-user Excel spreadsheets
that this represented, and nightly tape backups now, in place: Double-Take was the
decided to examine how he this is a backup of the only solution that was able to
could improve the company’s backup: the Double-Take replicate these files over
business continuity strategy. imp,ementation provides us correctly. The other products
with a higher level of that we looked at were not up
“Our experience with tape- availability and business to scratch.”
based back-up systems was continuity, while the tape is a
that the potential window of long-term backup.” Strange adds: “Our main
downtime was too large. We application is Pulse, which is
could lose up to twelve hours’ Purchase Process and essential to our business: it
worth of work, which was an Decision includes all our client data, it
unacceptable amount; the Strange looked at the data is used for valuations and
time taken to restore would replication solutions that also reporting. This is based
WWW.SNS-UK.CO.UK OCT 09
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44