Business Continuity Planning – life insurance for your organisation
NRMA Motoring & Services safeguards critical services with Macquarie Telecom solution
How long could your business survive without its IT and telecommunications systems – or
its office? One hour, five hours, a day?
Widespread disasters such as hail storms, cyclones, power outages and bush fires have all
wreaked havoc on Australian businesses in the past few years.
And the recent failure of the Australian Customs Service technology upgrade showed that
even events contained within an organisation can have a severe business impact on stakeholders
across Australia.
The ongoing cost of any disaster could be substantial.
Your organisation could experience decreased productivity, financial loss, potential loss
of customers or reputation damage. And breach of corporate governance or license guidelines
could even result in imprisonment.
Business Continuity Planning – life insurance for your organisation
A Business Continuity Plan puts in place the systems and processes to ensure uninterrupted
availability of business critical resources. These may include your telephone systems,
data networks, Web applications, CRM or ERP systems and even office space.
But many organisations don't have the internal resources or expertise to manage such complex
planning.
Outsourced providers such as Macquarie Telecom can provide the infrastructure requirements
to support your business continuity, disaster recovery and risk mitigation strategies.
As part of a recent technology upgrade, NRMA Motoring & Services appointed Macquarie
Telecom to host its disaster recovery IT infrastructure.
NRMA uses a custom-built Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) program to field calls from customers
with car troubles and jobs are dispatched out to the patrol vehicles' onboard computer via
GPRS.
The NRMA has 500 patrol vans and motorcycles on duty 24 hours to respond to more than 6,000
calls for help each day.
“If our CAD system went down, NRMA customers could be left waiting for quite a long time,
which is inconsistent with NRMA's reputation for delivering high quality services,” said Craig
Gibbons, Head of ICT, NRMA Motoring & Services.
“Building a disaster recovery solution into our latest CAD upgrade is standard risk mitigation
procedure.”
NRMA and Macquarie Telecom worked together to build a disaster recovery site that
is a mirror image of NRMA's environment.
Macquarie Telecom's co-location service connects with NRMA's production site in North Strathfield
site and its call centre in Gosford. The two sites are joined by a dedicated 2Mbps link. Each
site runs two Dell 2850, clustered Oracle databases on an EMC CX300 SAN.
GPRS communications links were also established between the NRMA production site, its Gosford
call centre and Macquarie Telecom so that, in the event of a disaster at one of the NRMA sites,
the entire fleet of patrol vehicles remain connected to the CAD system.
And there is a hot desk for five IT staff at Macquarie Telecom's data centre.
Now, should system failure occur, the NRMA can redirect services from its production site
LAN to its Disaster Recovery site at Macquarie Telecom. No more than two minutes is lost
during the switch to back-up.
Security, quality and choice
Macquarie Telecom manages the disaster recovery infrastructure requirements for leading
Australian businesses and government agencies from its dedicated data hosting facility, the
Intellicentre.
The Intellicentre's carrier independence and international accreditations are unequalled
in Australia, ensuring the highest standards of security, quality and choice.
Craig Gibbons from the NRMA said about the Intellicentre, “It has an impressive level
of resilience and security built in. Combined with the certifications and accreditations
Macquarie Telecom has gained, this gives us the assurance that Macquarie Telecom has all the
systems and processes necessary to meet our corporate governance standards.”
Macquarie Telecom can help you manage your Business Continuity planning by providing a
range of services including:
- Strategy and consultancy – Services range from identification of potential
areas of risk through to development of detailed business continuity, disaster recovery
and risk mitigation strategies
- Risk Mitigation, Back up and Mirroring Solutions – Macquarie Telecom can develop
and host a mirrored data solution that duplicates your own site. This provides comprehensive
business continuity in the face of both planned and unplanned outages
- Primary/Secondary Site Hosting – Diversify your risk by hosting either your
primary site, or secondary site at Macquarie Telecom's Intellicentre
- Macquarie Remote Server Backup and Recovery – Ideal for the growing business,
Macquarie Remote Server Backup and Recovery allows you to back up documents via the Macquarie
Telecom network to the Macquarie Intellicentre
>> Learn more about Macquarie Telecom's Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Services
>> Read more about the NRMA's disaster recovery environment that is co-located in
Macquarie
Telecom's Intellicentre
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