Business Challenge

A major apparel manufacturer was seeking expert advice on its disaster recovery architecture.  The company was confronted with two key issues surrounding disaster recovery planning: how to determine an appropriate budget for their disaster recovery infrastructure, and how to optimize their resources in implementing it.

Solution

Forsythe performed a review of the manufacturer’s current disaster recovery capabilities and requirements.  The review began with a thorough evaluation of the IT environment, including prioritization of its applications in terms of mission-criticality, documentation of application interdependencies, and determination of best-case order of recovery.  The next step was to help the company understand what risks it faced, the potential consequences of an interruption to its business units, and the array of options available given certain business assumptions.

Then, Forsythe worked with the company to develop a disaster-recovery strategy and architecture based upon the requirements identified in the review, and taking into account industry best-practices.  In developing a strategy, key issues considered included:  In the event of a disaster, what connectivity would exist?  Would end-users be able to access the applications while they were being hosted at the disaster recovery site?  Would the company be able to restore and synchronize lost data across the applications as the applications were recovered?  Forsythe also provided the company with best-practice guidelines for evaluating the cost-feasibility of the disaster-recovery architecture it had developed.

Results

Based upon Forsythe’s findings, the client was able to validate and execute a disaster recovery architecture that took advantage of certain environment redundancies to create a workable disaster recovery infrastructure within budget.  Strategies involved exchanging some of its systems between two locations, and load balancing so that some of its existent resources could be dedicated to disaster recovery.   This project has already begun to reduce the current risks to the company’s business continuity.