How organisations can effect faster, affordable
business recoveries wHile involving more of tHeir people
When organisations make business continuity plans to cope with
a disaster, they tend to focus most attention on the immediate
aftermath: the priority is to ensure key staff – typically around 30%
of the workforce – have connectivity and an alternative workplace
from which to get critical systems up and running again quickly.
Mobile workers are generally expected to carry on as normal using
VPN connectivity, although some loss of productivity may be expected
due to the temporary unavailability of systems or information.
But what of the remaining staff who may account for up to 60% of the
workforce? While these valuable employees could play an important
role in minimising disruption and maintaining a semblance of normality
for customers, in most cases this expensive resource is currently
expected to stay home, adding no value to the business and being
paid, in effect, to do nothing.
one of the reasons for the status quo is that senior management faces significant difficulties in assuring the availability of desktop and telephony provision for the workforce at large. They must grapple with challenges such as:
Reining in the runaway cost of PC management
Distributing and securing devices regardless of location Staying compliant with the plethora of regulations and policies Supporting a dynamic and changing workforce
Mitigating the effects of interruptions – whether headline-grabbing disasters or more run-of-the-mill workplace disruptions.
Unsurprisingly, these issues have meant that developing sustainable, cost-effective, resilient solutions to ensure the entire workforce is always available has until now been seen as an insurmountable challenge.
This is particularly so in the current economic climate, as businesses continue to mitigate the effects of the downturn and prepare to exploit the hoped for upturn. Yet when finances are finely balanced the very last thing an organisation needs is any downtime, which could be perceived by the public and markets as a business in financial difficulty.
But technological developments are always pushing the boundaries for recovery solutions, bringing more sophisticated, affordable solutions than were previously available within the grasp of a greater number of organisations.
Today, innovations in virtual desktop integration/Hosted virtual desktop (vdi/ Hvd) technologies are set to bring about a sea change in expectations of what is possible.
Promised benefits include:
The recovery of higher numbers of staff more quickly and economically Effective PC and telephony restores
Easy to use, secure browser access Local and convenient recovery for staff
Mitigation of wide area and pandemic disruptions
Flexibility to interchange between physical and virtual workplace recovery scenarios. A solution that works without needing USB flashdrives or other portable media that are both a burden to administer, maintain, distribute or collect AnD also pose a possible security risk. Innovative solutions are also emerging for the deployment of voice calls from a single hum to a multitude of locations and devices these enable remote and active participation in DDI and hunt Group calls and inbound and outbound call monitoring
The ability to combine these innovations into a secure single sign on opens up the possibility to full virtual recovery.
There is no value in paying your staff to do nothing
sungard availability services is the first information availability provider to exploit the possibilities offered by these technological advances with its new recover anywhere™ service. It believes that instead of paying staff to do nothing and handing over larger than necessary premiums to insurance providers, organisations could potentially reduce premiums by investing in a solution that keeps the business running at near normal levels.
A Recover Anywhere™ approach can extend the recovery to include those valuable staff
usually left out of a recovery solution by providing them with virtual access to information and telephony. This allows them to continue working wherever best suits them and the business – all that’s needed is a PC, phone and broadband connection.
Workplace Recovery strategy options...
Workplace Recovery Strategy Options…
1. Extend and cost-effectively fill in workforce recovery gapsWorkplace Critical 30-40% Ideal 20-30%
2. Extend, fill in your workforce recovery gaps and ATOD flex the contract to enable a proportion of your critical staff to recover anywhere
3. As per strategy 2 but across multiple sites and leveraging contract flexibility from three sites.
Ideal 20-30% Field 20%
Workplace Critical 30-40%
Virtual contract
flexibility remaining balanceCritical staff
Key: Workplace physical positions
Workplace 1 Workplace 1 Workplace 1
Virtual contract
flexibility remaining balanceCritical staff
Recover AnywhereTMvirtual positions
Ideal 20-30% Field 20%
More staff = faster recovery
the more people recovered in the early stages of an incident, the more likely it is that the business will recover. Industry experience shows that the most effective way to achieve this is to recover staff to the most convenient location that best meets both business needs and the employee’s domestic arrangements – especially relevant in instances of pandemic, wide area, long-term and some weather-based scenarios.
The more convenient recovery is for staff, the more likely they are to support recovery efforts and stay committed to the business until restore is completed. in long-term recovery scenarios where it may take six months or longer to fully recover and restore the business (events like the Buncefield oil depot explosion or the Sheffield and Gloucester floods),
staff are forced into choosing between your business recovery and their own domestic arrangements. recover anywhere™ can help businesses avoid such conflicts.
The Recover Anywhere
™approach
The foundations of Recover Anywhere™ have been laid over the past ten years and were driven by SunGard’s invocation experience and a change in customers’ recovery strategies which, over time, saw a shift from single to multiple site recovery models being adopted. Further technical enhancements and scale have been made to provide the Recover
Anywhere™ solution with all the speed, bandwidth and flexibility needed to support multiple enterprise customers recovering simultaneously across the virtualised and physical workplace environments enabling organisations to:
Encompass more employees and additional functions for less cost Recover their desktop and full telephony capability
Enjoy business as usual routing of inbound calls offer location-independent recovery to all staff Mitigate wide area disruptions
have the flexibility to convert physical workplace positions to virtual recovery positions At Time of Disaster (AToD)
Recover their staff literally anywhere without the need for USB dongles or other physical devices and the associated administrative burden of distribution, maintenance and collection
Avoid the time and aggravation of reconciling personal phone bills post-invocation.
SunGard’s Workplace Recovery evolution
Recover Anywhere™
Recover to any/multiple sites Secure, hosted, flexible dealing Flexible recovery – near and far
Rollback to another site
2001 2010
Location
SunGard’s Workplace Recovery Evolution
Connectivit
Recover Anywhere™ is the logical progression of SunGard’s workplace Recovery services, which started with being the first provider to offer businesses the facility to rollback to another site, then split site options for near and far recovery strategies, recovery to multiple sites and, what is arguably the most complex recovery of all, Secure hosted Dealing recovery to any site.
So how does it work? SunGard’s considerable, long-term investment in its infrastructure, from desktop to telephony, has enabled it to create a virtualised recovery capability that seamlessly integrates with its physical workplace recovery service. This shared recovery environment is created using a combination of virtualised PC images and softphone telephony, wAn/LAn connectivity and physical workplace ghost images.
while virtualised recovery on its own is not a ‘silver bullet’, it does represent a vital part of the recovery mix and is potentially the most effective method to deal with pandemic scenarios and long-term disruptions. however, there are limitations – the most obvious being that a recovery plan based on virtualisation alone has an automatic single point of failure and could be rendered impotent from the end users perspective should there a comms or power outage in the local area. so it’s imperative to have a physical workplace recovery capability for your most critical staff.
Mobile working brings its own set of issues to consider – how will compliance, security and health and safety requirements be addressed, for example? Then there are the people factors to bear in mind. human beings are social animals and while homeworking suits some personalities, others need the social interaction that comes from working together in a common office environment. Certain business processes require people to work collaboratively in teams to be effective and others depend on the physical transfer of pieces of paper.
For these reasons, most companies find a mix of physical workplace and virtual recovery positions to be the most effective solution for recoveries lasting weeks or months, rather than a few days.
Recover Anywhere
TMOne seamless, shared recovery environment
Recover AnywhereTM
Multiple Site Recovery Workplace
Virtualised PC images & Softphone telephony
WAN, LAN, connectivity Physical Workplace
Ghost images
Rethinking Workplace Recovery strategies
with the right infrastructure and capability, organisations can now consider exciting new workforce recovery options. however, before implementing a recover anywhere™ strategy some vital questions need to be answered, such as:
what type of disruptions are to be mitigated? Pandemic, snow, flooding, terror attack or the more typical disruptions such as hardware and power failure?
which other departments, people or processes are desirable to recover to improve customer experience during a business interruption?
where would people be recovered to if the decision is based on the needs of staff and the business? Their home, a recovery partner’s site, a serviced office, café or a hotel?
where would people be recovered to, considering the tasks they perform and the sensitivity of the data they access and process?
how confidential are calls and data in light of the lack of control over who else might be listening or have sight of an employee’s screen and paper printouts?
To what technology would you route DDI calls through to? Business desk phone, business mobile phone, smart phone, domestic phone, employees’ own mobiles or soft phones? how might business calls be recorded to comply with industry regulation?
how do you prevent employees’ domestic or mobile phone bills going through the roof? (SunGard’s solution neatly counters this problem by ensuring all calls made using the Recover Anywhere™ service are charged directly to the company’s phone bill rather than the individual’s).
what hR policies changes are required to allow staff to work from home?
how do you get your employees buy in to use their domestic home ICT for recovery? how do you ensure that when you need to recover the business, your supplier has the
ability to handle multiple invocations in terms of telephony and virtual desktop provision? Is your enterprise able to use a pool of recovery resources over multiple physical locations
In this scenario, fictional organisation ‘Coverall Insurance’ deploys the Recover Anywhere™ and CMS approaches towards more effective and productive Workplace Recovery
Recover Anywhere
™keeps insurer afloat during floods
Business problemA general insurer needed to get more of its workforce back to work more quickly in the event of a business interruption to maintain its market position. It needed a flexible, affordable solution that would allow it to operate ‘business as usual’ within hours of a disaster.
Business benefits
Allows recovery to be extended to 80% or more of employees
Flexibility at time of disaster to switch 50% of physical recovery positions for virtual positions near normal operations with negligible loss of productivity or revenue
Easy to administer – no need to distribute or maintain portable devices Minimises inconvenience to employees, preserving goodwill
Cost of work telephone calls automatically charged to company.
‘Coverall Insurance’, a thriving firm providing a range of general insurance products, faced a dilemma: over 500 people were employed at its Bournemouth head office yet budgetary constraints meant less than half of these staff were covered by its recovery plan.
As a longstanding SunGard Availability Services customer, Coverall recognised the
importance of business continuity planning to minimise disruption in the event of a disaster. For many years it had contracted 100 shared seats at a SunGard workplace Recovery centre [A] nearby, which would give its call centre agents an alternative office equipped with all the technology and telephony (including DDI calls) it would need to keep the business running if Coverall’s own premises were unavailable for any reason.
This provision was supplemented by a further 100 workplace positions at a second site [B] 25 miles away. As all of SunGard’s sites are connected by its award-winning communications network, the insurer had the added peace of mind that comes from knowing it could ‘rollback’ to any site in the UK in the event of a widespread disaster.
RECOVERY
A. 100 staff B. 200 staff
200 staff using Recover Anywhere
Branch offices too far away Head office:
500 staff – 80% recovery plan
‘Near & far Recovery’
sites A & B
People Recovery
of the 200 employees covered by the plan, 30 were members of the IT team needed for the recovery effort, while the remainder were call centre agents who would man the phones and respond to email enquiries from prospective customers and existing policyholders. This skeleton call centre team would be vital in maintaining a semblance of normality, reducing lost revenue and preserving market confidence.
A familiar dilemma
Coverall’s Board considered this plan adequate to keep the firm ‘ticking over’ in the immediate aftermath of a business interruption. But the directors knew they needed to get closer to business as usual if the firm was to keep its position in the fiercely competitive insurance marketplace. Yet increasing the number of workplace positions to cover all 500 employees could not be commercially justified.
Coverall found the solution to its dilemma in SunGard’s new Recover Anywhere™ service, which enables it to extend its recovery to cover all of its employees, not just the 200 allocated workplace positions. By harnessing innovations in Virtual Desktop Integration/ hosted Virtual Desktop technologies (VDI/hVD), Recover Anywhere™ pushes the boundaries of what is possible. Coverall Insurance can get more of its workforce back to work quickly and affordably so that instead of remaining in crisis mode it is able to operate at near normal levels. Consequently, Coverall has adapted its contingency plans. now, in the event of a disaster, it will still direct its 200 designated employees to its two nominated sungard workplace recovery centres, but instead of effectively paying its remaining staffto do nothing at home, 200 more will continue to add value to the business. As Recover Anywhere™ incorporates a telephony solution, equipped with just a PC and a phone connection, all employees have access to the company data and systems they need to get on with their jobs. what’s more, to the delight of Coverall’s business continuity manager, as Recover Anywhere™ is a secure browser-based solution, it does not rely on staff having USB flashdrives or other portable media that are frequently lost, become out-of-date and are a burden to maintain. Coverall refined its plan using specialist BCM software tools from SunGard’s Continuity Management Solutions (CMS) range. Firstly, having assessed the many potential threats to the business using CMS Risk Assessment and CMS Business Impact Analysis they could take steps to mitigate them. Then the CMS workforce Assessment module helped the insurer work out which recovery centre (if any) was more convenient for each individual and who would be best suited to recover at home based on criteria such as:
Proximity from the office and each recovery centre willingness to work from home
Suitability to work from home based on the task, sensitivity of data and call types handled Availability of a PC and access to telephony.
Recover Anywhere
™in action
when heavy rainfall led to severe flooding, a common occurrence in the great British summer, flood waters cut off the approach road to Coverall’s head office. Making matters worse, water had made the small bridge at the entrance to the office park unstable. Faced with a denial of access scenario, the insurer was forced to invoke its workplace recovery contract with SunGard and prepared to transfer operations to the two designated recovery centres. Compounding the problem, Coverall soon discovered the floods were blocking the two major A roads into the town where its closest recovery centre ‘A’ is located. All traffic travelling to the area was severely delayed and could remain so for several months until the roads were made passable and the bridge serving the industrial estate replaced.
Workplace Recovery Centre A
100 physical positions Workplace Recovery Centre B 100 physical positions
200 Recover Anywhere 50 100 Recovery Centre B 50 Recovery Centre A 100
Staff close to A recover
Staff farthest away convert.
Flexible Advantage ATOD
Coverall took advantage of the increased flexibility afforded by Recover Anywhere™ to respond swiftly to the changed circumstances. It switched 50 employees who were due to work from the now inaccessible recovery centre from physical to virtual recovery positions instead (making a total of 250 virtual recovery positions). Added to this, 100 employees would still relocate to workplace Recovery centre ‘B’ further afield, as originally planned.
Using the CMS notiFind crisis communications tool, Coverall was able to quickly check that its employees were safe, alert them to the impact on the business and discover who was available for work. Some employees’ homes had been flooded and, understandably, they were unable to focus on their jobs while they dealt with the aftermath.
others had to resolve childcare problems caused by the closure of local schools affected by the flooding until the council could find a workaround. while many parents needed to stay at home, several were still able to contribute some hours of work using the Recover Anywhere™ service. They could do so secure in the knowledge that they would not be faced with inflated home phone bills for business use as all work calls would automatically be charged to coverall direct.
Armed with this information on staff availability, Coverall’s business continuity manager made final adjustments to his personnel allocation list, swapping those staff whose homes had been affected by the flood with others available to work. earlier mapping of employee domiciles had already identified those individuals nearest to the accessible recovery centre so that only those closest to the site needed to journey there and, familiar with local short cuts, they were able to avoid the worst of the traffic delays.
the remaining employees who lived further away and would have been hard hit by traffic arising from the road closures were able to work at home instead, avoiding hours in traffic jams at both ends of the day.
Recover Anywhere™’s realistic pricing structure made it affordable for Coverall to get more of its staff back to work more quickly and achieve the recommended goal of 60-80% of employees recovered. (Source: Vanson Bourne Survey 2010)
Conclusion
Factors to consider when choosing a provider
mobile devices can be the weak link in the chain – If you are planning to include mobile workers in your recovery strategy, can your provider ensure they will always have any necessary equipment? USB dongles, for instance, can be easily misplaced or become out of date. It is far better to opt for a solution that is not reliant on such devices but uses secure, browser-based access instead.
don’t underestimate the importance of your telephony – It is vital to ensure heavily promoted phone numbers, such as claims lines or customer services departments, remain operational to avoid the appearance of a business in trouble. Can the provider ensure all advertised contact numbers will remain active? will your solution allow you to deliver calls to groups of people and reach individuals on their normal Direct Dial Inbound (DDI) numbers?
build in flexibility – will the provider allow you to flex the contract At Time of Disaster to create the optimum mix of physical workplace and virtual recovery positions to suit the prevailing circumstances?
check your potential partner’s pedigree – You need to know you can rely on your partner to deliver when you need them most. SunGard maintains an industry-leading 100% invocation success rate and it is this experience that has shaped its virtualised recovery proposition and resilient recovery infrastructure. not all providers are the same so discuss your prospective partner’s track record.
This meant that rather than coverall’s operation merely ticking over, it was able to achieve near normal levels of productivity. Equally importantly, it was able to balance the needs of the business with those of its staff, avoiding work/life conflicts that often arise in a disaster recovery situation and preserving employee goodwill – a particularly important factor when the recovery period is likely to be weeks or months, rather than days.
“We are no longer paying staff to do nothing when disaster strikes – now everyone is adding value to the business”.
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