Data centre & ICT service provider
The Client
International IT services company with over 50,000 staff worldwide and 6,000 within the UK.
The Challenge
The primary customer for this data centre facility had challenged the efficiency of the business continuity and ICT disaster recovery solutions in place and whether these would ensure that key IT infrastructure and management services would continue at acceptable levels in the event of an incident. Any doubts that could lead to a loss of contract needed to be quashed and the customer needed to have a greater understanding of how an incident could impact services so that plans could be integrated and expectations managed effectively.
The client had experienced a significant power outage issue in 2008 which resulted in an unacceptable service downtime to a large and strategically important client. Having invested time and effort in revising their business continuity and incident response plans and procedures, they invited Teed to design and facilitate a challenging exercise which would thoroughly stretch their ability to respond to a similar scale of incident. The additional challenge was that they had invited representatives from within a number of different significant customers to observe the exercise and wanted to be able to convince them of their capabilities.
The Solution
Teed were asked to design and facilitate an appropriate desktop exercise that would allow the effectiveness of the response and recovery processes to be determined. Approximately 20 participants responded to the evolving scenario over 3 hours, utilising existing plans and response structures.
The Result
The customer was satisfied that comprehensive and effective plans and recovery strategies were in place. There were several misunderstandings identified in respect of the potential outage times for services, which was due to the customer not having appreciated the implications of current contract arrangements. Areas for investigation were identified and agreed, including a realisation by the customer that their own plans needed to be enhanced to ensure that they integrated effectively with the suppliers.