Disaster Recovery in Salisbury for Charity DBF & DBE
Date: Sep 8, 2020
Introduction
Our Client
Salisbury Diocesan Board of Finance (DBF) is a charitable organisation that is linked with many charities, church organisations, mission agencies, non-government organisations, retreat houses and trusts.
The problem
A Fair Amount of Time to Recover Should There Be a Total Loss of Their Systems
DBF / DBE were concerned that despite having full back ups of their IT systems, if there were to be a total loss of IT systems there would be a fair time involved to recover them to a situation that the organisation could function correctly.
The charity already had significant diverse infrastructure, so the plan was to leverage existing hardware and sufficiently air gapped buildings to deploy a IT disaster recovery solution that would ensure business continuity. This way they could continue to function should one of their servers or sites become unavailable.
The Solution
Utilising Microsoft Technology in a Bespoke Way
To do this we used existing Microsoft technology in a bespoke way to keep two separate warm standby replicas of the servers on-site and off-site using the two separate sites. Each site housed primary servers for itself and replicas of the same site and the other sites servers as secondary copies which were kept in sync through local and extended replication.
This means that if the main IT system fails for its primary site or incur a loss the first replica would be invoked, and their systems would be back up and running in a matter of minutes.
If either site were to incur a total failure or a loss, then the second replica would be invoked, and the systems could be accessed remotely until the lost site were recovered and have their systems back online at the site.
This system is also completely expandable so if a secondary replica was invoked then another copy of that can be made to always keep a warm standby in operation in case of a further failure.
The Outcome
Faster and More Reliable Recovery Times
This solution has a Recovery Point Objective of 5 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective of 30 minutes meaning that if a server or site were lost then only 5 minutes of work would be lost and it would only take 30 minutes at most to bring the systems back online.