Disaster Recovery

In order to ensure SOX compliance or pass any reasonable audit process, it is essential that financial reporting departments can demonstrate that they have made adequate provision for the disaster recovery of their financial reporting environments.

Key aspects that any disaster recovery provision should encompass are:

Geographical distance from existing IT infrastructure
Sufficient capacity to deal with core functionality / key users
Ability to perform periodic checks of recovery procedures without impacting production
Speed of activation
Accessibility

Traditionally, this has resulted in the need for companies to invest heavily in a duplicated physical infrastructure, located in a secondary datacenter with high-bandwidth connectivity and to manage this infrastructure and the processes necessary to migrate data and applications between them.

This is both a costly and complex undertaking, that results in considerable overheads when considering version updates and the lifetime of the deployed infrastructure. It's possible for very large companies to achieve this on the back of existing provisions for core IT-systems, but is difficult to achieve for the majority of companies either through lack of infrastructure or budget.

Thanks to our investment in existing datacenter infrastructure to service our RRDK and Hosting offerings, Infratects is in a unique position to offer a cost-effective, unique offering for our clients.

Our secure, remote, datacenter with internet-based access, combined with our EPM know-how means that we can offer a disaster recovery provision that meets all criteria.

As a client, all you need to decide is:

How up-to-date you want to maintain the data and applications within the DR facility
How many users you would want to access the environment if it were activated
How frequently you want to perform DR testing

Based on these criteria, and the size of your existing production environment, we can offer you a service based on an initial setup fee, plus a minimal monthly retainer. In the event that you need to make use of the environment, the monthly charge is updated to reflect the use being made of the environment.

For this you recieve an enviornment that is an effective copy of your production environment. It is activated on a periodic basis (typically monthly) for a week so that can be updated with current data extracts, updated reports, new applications, and then hibernated until the next active period. In the event of a disaster, or for your periodic DR testing, the environment is fully activated and kept operational for an extended period of time and access is granted to an extended number of users.

For example, a client with a System 9 HFM/BI+ environment consisting of 3 servers, who wanted a monthly refresh of data, provision for 20 concurrent users in a disaster and to perform a DR test on an annual basis and was prepared to sign-up for 36 months would have the following fee structure:

One-time establishment fee €15k
Monthly Retainer €1.5k
Annual DR test (duration of 2 weeks) €3k
Monthly charge in the event of a DR €5k

Assuming the 3 years run without the need to perform a real disaster recovery, total cost would be €78k or €2,166 per calendar month.