Goodwill Industries Of Central Indiana Chooses An Easily Tested Disaster Recovery Solution That Stays In Sync With Production

Four years ago, Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana needed a disaster recovery (DR) plan.
In fact, they spent nearly $250,000 building a traditional DR solution that would adequately protect
their critical applications. Initial tests that year were successful. The next year, however, after a change in
personnel, they had to spend two months preparing for the test. Then the following year, after another
change in personnel (unrelated to DR challenges) they still had to spend months preparing for the test.

In the meantime, both environments needed to be kept in sync. When a capital investment was required in production, a similar investment was required in the DR environment. When a change was made to production, it had to be carried out in the DR environment as well. Staff members were spending too much time managing two environments.

"The problem with traditional disaster recovery solutions is that there has to be very stringent change control or management of the disaster recovery environment to ensure alignment with changes in production," explains Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana SVP of Corporate Connectivity and CIO Jeff Ton.

"The traditional solutions we used were put in place at a point in time,” Ton continued, “We tested those systems when they were built, and they worked. But, because they weren’t actively managed with the same level of detail the production infrastructure was on a day-to-day basis, they quickly grew to be outdated and unreliable."

See the full Case Study here.