Business Continuity
Canada
Business Continuity
Canada and the Royal Bank of Canada have a long
history. In a recent article I noticed what this organization was
doing to facilitate a proactive, preventative approach to business
continuity.
Once a company
realizes that weather, a blackout, or a virus could shut down
operations at any time, it's time to measure how long the business
could be down before financial consequences are calamitous.
Business Continuity
Canada – cost of
downtime
The Royal Bank of
Canada serves its top
customers from a division in hurricane-prone Florida. RBC
assessed the risks faced by the division and calculated that the
Florida operation could be inactive for two hours before incurring
millions of dollars in losses per hour.
So this coming year,
RBC will create a mirrored data center 60 miles from the original
center. The failover center will continually replicate data and take
over if worse comes to worst. The bank hired a third party, to help
make the strategy and technology choices.
Execs decided that the
second data center had to be within driving distance, but also had
to be somewhere that didn't normally experience the same weather
patterns as the primary data center.
Business Continuity
Canada – how far is far
enough?
The driving distance
part of the equation was important to ensure that employees would be
able to make it to the center. The bank looked at stats from
Hurricane Andrew, showing 70% of those who were supposed to move to
alternate locations were not willing to go during such an event. If
the house is destroyed and your wife and children are now homeless,
you won't leave them.
The bank saved a ton
of money by buying refurbished systems for the secondary center. For
example, RBC paid $36,000 for a used IBM iSeries server that would
have cost almost three times as much new.
More importantly, and
surprisingly, the bank expects to save money operating the second
data center on its own over using a third-party disaster-recovery
service from IBM or SunGard.
Overall a very
interesting approach!
Explore the Disaster Recovery
Toolkit
Contains 18 ready to use templates for successful
Disaster Recovery Planning / IT Service Continuity
Management
