Business Continuity Recovery Planning

Project Background

Multiple incidents in the Boston area (power outage, hurricanes, earthquake, tornado, and bombings) created a desire for IT to implement a system recovery plan and proposal for their on-campus data center.

The Strategy

We began by ascertaining Tier 1 (business critical) applications. Facilitated sessions helped IT staff look beyond the purpose of the institution (i.e., education) to things like life safety, security, and internal and external communication. A discovery process allowed us to create an inventory of applications to systems and dependencies between systems. Using that inventory, we were able to properly scope a Disaster Recovery environment. In order to acquire pricing, we conducted “mini-RFQs” for cloud services, colocation services, replication tools, and necessary hardware. We created a proposal and socialized it with the CFO, President, and the Building and Finance Committees.

Proven Results

• Multiple scenarios for Disaster Recovery were evaluated, along with improvements to the university’s production data center.
• Discounted pricing was obtained through the mini-RFQ process, along with vendor engagement in the solution.