Business Challenges:

When you’re in the people business, protecting your assets (the people) is your No. 1 priority. So naturally, if you have to choose, you’d want your disaster recovery solution to protect the servers most pertinent to accounting and ERP, right?

But what if you didn’t want to choose? What if you want your disaster recovery solution to do more?

Doug Feltman, director of systems and applications at 24 Seven, Inc., knows this feeling well. 24 Seven, a New York-based talent and recruiting firm, had been relying on log shipping as its disaster recovery solution for years, and Feltman simply didn’t feel comfortable with it. “We used log shipping to back up Microsoft Dynamics® GP, which is most important to us because accounting and ERP are central to our business,” he said. “Still, it’s just a sliver of what we needed to have protected.”

Feltman knew that any outage would result in an immediate loss of productivity, and downtime was simply not an option for the company, whose reputation wholly depends on efficiently serving its customers and employees. “It would have taken days to get everything up and running again,” he said. “I wanted to be able to turn to management and say, ‘If there’s trouble, we’re set.’ I couldn’t do that with our current plan.”

Testing the company’s disaster recovery solution was also a challenge, taking as long as an entire weekend. As a result, the system had only been tested once, when it was initially set up. Further complicating matters for Feltman and 24 Seven was the fact that all 20 of the company’s servers reside in New York.

“If something happened to our New York office, who knows if we would be able to do anything about it? We needed a change.”