17 November 2008

International SOS set up a disaster recovery site in Singapore

International SOS wanted to secure its critical data so that it was available to clients 24/7. It found the answer in the shape of the CA Recovery Management solution.

International SOS is a leading provider of medical assistance, international healthcare, security services and outsourced customer care. The company helps corporations, governments and individual members manage health and safety risks when they work abroad or travel, and provides emergency assistance via its network of 27 alarm centres and 26 international clinics.

International SOS needs to be ready for any eventuality and, as such, the organisation operates with a very low tolerance for downtime. Critical client and operational data resides in a number of business systems around the world, which need to be continuously available for the company to meet its service excellence goals.

Off-site disaster recovery for its operations in Singapore was not comprehensive enough. Any data loss or availability issues could impact operations, affect the company’s ability to provide timely services to its customers and result in financial consequence in the wake of a catastrophic event.

To address these challenges, the company decided to establish an offsite disaster recovery centre. “Our original intention was to recover data to another location, such as in Malaysia,” says Yan Mung Hou, regional ICT manager for International SOS. “We decided that a more realistic and practical model was to set up a disaster recovery site in Singapore.”

Management has paid a lot of attention to disaster recovery, and there has been much talk about it. Today, we look at disaster recovery as a global situation

Yan Mung Hou, International SOS Critically, International SOS needed to be able to switchover to a disaster recovery site in the shortest possible time and with minimum data loss. Following a five-month-long evaluation International SOS chose CA Recovery Management solution.

“The CA Recovery Management solution enables us to failover very quickly, and is easy to use,” says Yan. “One of the key features that won us over was the solution’s ability to roll back to a particular point in time and in a very short timescale. We cannot afford to wait two days to roll back.”

The rewind capabilities of CA XOsoft WANSync and WANSyncHA enables International SOS to pinpoint and recover the state of its data prior to an unexpected event. In this way, the business impact of a disaster can be minimised, and the company can continue processing information without any disruption to staff or clients.

Since the deployment, International SOS has conducted testing with its key applications including Microsoft Exchange 2003, SQL Server and Microsoft Internet Information Services.

The CA Recovery Management Solution has helped International SOS greatly reduce its downtime – in an actual disaster situation, the company expects to be able to switch everything over in two hours. As Yan confirms: “While other locations took more than a day, we took only two hours to failover. Obviously, minimum downtime is very important to our business.”

“I think this solution is critical,” concludes Yan. “Management has paid a lot of attention to disaster recovery, and there has been much talk about it. Today, we look at disaster recovery as a global situation.” Following the successful implementation in Singapore, International SOS is looking at consolidating its disaster recovery efforts across the region.

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