Case Study: Financial Institution

We have found that most companies have ideas around Disaster Recovery but do not have a carefully crafted plan or a properly tested run book to implement in the event of a disaster. Artemis Technology has successfully helped many financial institutions plan, design and implement DR strategies.

Company Profile

A regional bank located in the Greater Chicago area, comprised of 27 branch locations plus corporate offices.

Business Situation

This company needed to develop and implement a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan in line with the requirements of the Federal Financial Institutions Regulatory Council and other regulatory agencies. They had pursued a path of developing an in-house Business Continuity Plan over the past three years.  However, the approach and methodology used was predominantly IT centric.  This did not meet the needs of the business units; causing a disconnect between the IT organization and the business. Additionally, recent events in the banking industry had precipitated the need for a renewed approach.

Technical Situation

The company was approaching the situation in a manner typical of many organizations by taking each system and finding a way to replicate the system off-site.  This approach did not address the true business impact of interruptions on the ability of the company to deliver products and services to their customers.

Solution

Our solution involved working with the company to re-orient the approach to Business Continuity Planning from a customer product and service delivery perspective. Artemis was able to assist them in rebuilding their plan from the ground up by:

• Conducting a review of the existing Business Continuity Plans and performing a gap analysis using regulatory requirements and industry best practices
• Performing a Business Impact Analysis of interruptions to the company's ability to provide products and services to customers
• Develop a new Business Continuity Plan that truly addresses the impact to the company's operations from a process, people and technology perspective and their ability to continue serving their customers
• Implement a Disaster Recovery Plan for each of the core services required to recover operations in the event of a disaster, while also providing a split-production facility to increase availability during operational outages
• Deployed the foundations of ITSM (IT service management) components to improve services delivery and service support.

Benefits

By addressing the services and processes from a business perspective, we were not only able to:

• Provide a true operational Business Continuity Plan across all service processes
• Reduce the RTO/RPO of the environment from days to minutes
• Provide complete transparency to their customers for all core services
• Streamlined business process and improved process efficiencies.
• By decomposing and streamlining business processes the client's integration effort for future acquisitions has been greatly reduced.

Products and Services

Technical specifications

• Microsoft Operating Systems
• Microsoft Exchange
• Microsoft SQL
• Cisco Infrastructure
• HP Blade Servers
• InMage BC/DR replication and application protection software
• SAN storage ( HP and Hitachi)
• VMware
• EasyCMDB
• Checkpoint