The client

XYZ [name changed to protect client’s identity] is one of the main European Private Equity organisations, with over 10 offices and 250 employees across the globe.

The company’s funds, raised from pension funds and other institutions, make long-term investments in companies with the ambition of transforming their performance and driving sustainable growth.

XYZ has an internal IT department and since 2005 relies on ER Information Systems for third line support to augment the IT team. It allows them to focus on internal services that support business operations while ERIS develops projects to improve and update the IT infrastructure.

Some examples of projects completed for XYZ include virtualisation, hardware rationalisation, email archiving, deployment of the CRM system and MS Office upgrades.

The challenge

Before adopting the current solution, XYZ used to have a backup system where its data was recorded onto tape and stored offsite by a specialist company. Although working well for individual data restores, the system had never been tested in a disaster recovery simulation.

In the event of a real disaster, it would have taken at least a couple of days to restore the data from the backup tapes and make the restored system accessible to users. This process would have required the purchase and set up of new servers and reconfiguration of the networks.

XYZ firm advises funds with a committed capital of approximately €20 billion. Its servers contain financial, investor and contractual data. All this needs to be accessed on a regular basis and stored safely. Any failure that could limit access to data or lead to hours of lost productivity would be detrimental to the business. Multiple offices could be affected by the system failure in one office.

XYZ’s requirement to keep data safe goes beyond its business. The company is regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and is required to comply with a number of rules and practices. This includes proper backup management and retention of its data for long periods of time. Data can be requested by authorities for the purposes of investigations or legal actions, for example. The company is liable if it fails to produce data within designated time frames. Nowadays, with technology solutions available, even catastrophes are rarely accepted as an excuse.

The solution

Prior to the implementation, ER Information Systems performed an evaluation of XYZ’s specific needs in which their IT Director prioritised their core business applications and data. This process allowed the definition of differentiated acceptable downtime in case of a disaster. This approach enabled ERIS to combine available technologies to provide a cost-effective solution to meet XYZ’s requirement without exceeding the budget.

XYZ indicated that email is vital and an outage longer than two hours would be unacceptable. Based on this, ER Information Systems designed a disaster recovery solution for XYZ’s email servers that replicates all the data in real- time. In case of a disaster, all communication can be diverted to the secondary servers in less than an hour.

On the other hand, XYZ has defined that other application servers could stay offline for a longer period of time without causing major problems for the company. Therefore, for these servers, ER Information Systems implemented a disaster recovery solution based on lower cost technologies. Data is now stored offsite and is quickly accessible, unlike tape backups. Although the process of provisioning a new server with restored data is longer than a real-time DR solution, this option is more suitable for recovering less critical, lower priority systems.

One of the main advantages of the disaster recovery solution provided by ERIS is that it is regularly tested through planned invocations, to guarantee that it is running correctly.

Although XYZ has its own IT team, to implement and manage the DR system by themselves would have been time- consuming and would have required specific training. The decision of engaging ERIS for the service was strategic, as architecting DR solutions is a central part of ERIS’ skill set and expertise.

The positive outcome

XYZ now has a more reliable and usable disaster recovery system in place, that found a balance between its needs and the budget it had available. “It gives resilience to the company’s operations which are highly dependent on technology.

The client has invoked the disaster recovery system on a few occasions, such as when a hardware issue stopped its primary email servers. On another occasion, DR was invoked strategically for planned downtime when the company was moving offices. This prevented long interruptions in its business activities.

The solution is managed by ERIS and does not demand much time from XYZ’s busy IT team.

From the client

"The disaster recovery system from ER is quicker, more efficient and ensures less potential data loss than the previous solution. In case of a disaster, it would take 1 hour to resume email services and 3 hours to resume other services. ER provides an efficient, professional and knowledgeable service."

X.Z., IT Director, XYZ Private Equity