The Challenge

The Yellowstone Club is a mid-size, privately-owned resort and ski club located in central Montana. The Director of Technology was aware of the inadequate backup system previously in place; he had been working towards updating the outdated system. When the resort experienced an event requiring recovery from the backup servers, the need for immediate changes was magnified. The internal IT department and accountants were left cleaning up the effected systems for nearly two weeks. After the recovery from the event died down, management eventually decided to move forward with backup strategy improvements.

The Solution

The Yellowstone Club IT department had experience working with other firms, including big names from big cities; however, it became obvious that a local presence was beneficial. Having worked with HEO Tech on a number of small projects, it was an easy decision to hire HEO Tech for the consultation and design of the new Disaster Recovery Strategy. During consultation, the IT department found that the knowledgeable HEO Tech staff helped to define the needs and demands of a successful disaster recovery strategy. HEO Tech staff established and defined the requirements of RTO (recovery time objectives – how long the company is down) and RPO (recovery point objectives – how much data the company loses), as well as built a business case and justified the needs to management. After the consulting phase was complete, HEO Tech helped the internal IT department implement the complex strategy. Additionally, HEO Tech staff automated testing of the DR strategy components and helped staff to understand and achieve the goals surrounding RTO, RPO and the automation.

The Results

The most significant benefit of the disaster recovery strategy design and implementation is that the critical virtual machines are replicated every hour and no more than one hour of data can be lost. To document the planning and ensure consistent DR responses, HEO Tech staff created a “Disaster Recovery Playbook” identifying different scenarios of failure and the process for remedying those situations.

Since implementation of the new strategy, there are no longer considerable amounts of failed backups. A significant amount of time is saved in lost output for both the internal IT team and the accountants in recovering backed up data. In addition, the strategy has proved to save time with facilitation, real storage and monitoring systems. The quality of the implementation has resulted in few issues and minimal maintenance or effort in managing the backup system despite its significantly enhanced capabilities.

The internal IT department is impressed with the response time of the HEO Tech firm; rarely has the company gone more than two hours before there is a response to a request. Quick response time and the knowledge of the employees sets HEO Tech apart from other companies. The request for change (RFC) process is very clearly and thoroughly defined, resulting in fewer issues arising during the process; the check list for the process is very comprehensive.