Global Bank delivers annual mainframe assured disaster recovery exercise using ICEFLO

The Challenge

An Assured Disaster Recovery rehearsal is a massive logistical, technical and collaboration challenge. The challenges faced are different before, during and after the event itself.

Before

• Coordinating multiple teams across the globe and asserting runbook standards
• Building integrated runbooks to deliver an overall DR cutover plan
• Accurately identifying task duration and dependencies within each runbook
• Providing evidence to secure sufficient confidence in the DR cutover plan 

During

• Tightly orchestrating the array of people and activities during the DR cutover
• Continuously tracking status and accurately forecasting the end time 
• Identifying issues and managing them effectively, including their impact on the forecast end time
• Prioritising scarce resources, typically people with multiple concurrent tasks
• Providing accurate, timely and trusted status reports to senior executives
• Avoiding any service impact due to an over-run of the ADR event itself

After

• Providing a factual report of all that took place
• Capturing lessons learned and delivering a proven DR cutover plan
• Providing unequivocal evidence to the Regulator on the achievements made

The dedicated team of ADR specialists were familiar with all of these challenges and felt that ICEFLO helped them to better address each of them.