Combined ITDR for a data centre location

The brief

The European (ECB) regulation requires banks to regularly demonstrate their business continuity capability and perform disaster recovery tests. In case of an infrastructure outsourcing, the outsourcing provider is obliged of performing these tests.

To fulfil this obligation and to finalise a data centre relocation, a leading infrastructure and hosting provider for German regional banks, agreed with 13 customers to perform a combined ITDR test for the major data centre, providing proof of effective business continuity capability of the data centre.

The ITDR plan test was designed to simulate an outage of a data centre location and failure of all affected systems of the banks , including shared appliances to the backup location. As this test had already been postponed two times, the client faced the imminent challenge.

Our approach

• Next to an overarching project and budget planning, one of the challenges was aligning all the required technical experts to ensure resourcing was fit for purpose.
• Among the major success factors to achieve a reliable personnel in addition to appropriate test planning included the following:​​
  • Aggregating the ITDR plan runbooks per customer into one overall recovery sequence playbook for a weekend exercise to allow the identification of required resource skills and dependencies
  • Perform tabletop walkthroughs with the SMEs to identify the correct activities, responsibilities, and adjust scheduling and assignments where needed
  • Meticulously plan weekend assignments with the team manager (more than 50 departments, 200 technical experts involved)

The solution and key benefits

The ITDR test was successfully performed in a two-week period. On the first weekend, the emergency mode was established by moving the operation of all relevant infrastructure to the backup location following standardised failover procedures.

The business operation of the customer was delivered for one week out of the backup location with only minor disruptions. After one week operation in the emergency mode, infrastructure operation was moved back into the primary data centre location and the regular operation mode re-established.

With this test, the client could prove successfully the business continuity capability of the data centre and his ability of a resilient infrastructure service provision.