For CIOs and IT managers the focus on business continuitywithin organisations has been gaining increasing focus, as boards and business managers assess the possible impact of downtime on the enterprise.
Greg Carvouni, CIO at the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) spoke at an Australian Information Industry Association briefing last week about how the RTA approaches business continuity planning.
Carvouni outlined IT systems that his organisation relied on as including its front office system called DRIVES, the back office SAP system, as well as infrastructure supporting the transport management and call centres.
He said that customer transactions were dependent on its IT&T system. This includes the 50,000 transactions undertaken via its Web site per month, with 250,000 people logging on to its driver tests and 650,000 number plate searches carried out. There is also a 180-seat call centre based in Newcastle, and 128 Registries throughout the state.
"[Our] philosophy is to build in as much resilience into each stage of the process," Carvouni said. This includes dual networks, diverse paths and dual routers. An annual data centre and network failure simulation is also carried out as part of the organisation's business continuity process.
Rather than just putting standby systems in place and not using them until there's a disaster, Carvouni said that the RTA tests these at least once a month, with the system also used as a development environment, such as for releasing new software.
In the event that there are network or data centre failures, the front-office systems at the registries have the ability to switch to a local offline process, so that as many customer transactions as possible can still be carried out. There is also hot standby for business critical systems, such as networks, data centres and storage area networks.
Carvouni said that there was about a 20 to 30 minute recovery at the standby data centre for its front-office systems, and about two to four hours recovery for SAP and most of the organisation's other systems.
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