“Business continuity testing is an important commitment to our clients and we take it very seriously,” affirms Frank DeSantis, DDS’ director of Operations. “We offer this service and encourage as many clients as possible to participate. We want to be absolutely certain that our service is bulletproof.”

Eighteen teams from Operations and Client Service participate in the exercise, preparations for which begin several months before the actual test date. A detailed project plan, which specifies step-by-step instructions for every team, is posted on several servers worldwide. This ensures retrieval of the project plan even if one or two servers are inaccessible.

Installation of the BC site began Friday morning. All systems – including 36 physical and 47 virtual servers – were up and running by 2:00 pm Saturday, as scheduled. The 25 North American clients who opted to participate in this year’s testing recreated their transactions from Monday, April 24. They pulled data from the mainframe, ran reports, cut checks, sent faxes, and communicated with hosted Tempo and Presto servers.

During the four-hour window prearranged for the test, clients executed 75,342 transactions. DDS processed 736 Soon reports and 617 overnight reports, which generated 80,000 printed pages delivered to clients the next day.

“Initiative was very pleased with the results of last week’s annual Business Continuity testing exercise,” says Ruth Schenendorf, CIO at Initiative. “The joint DDS and Initiative project teams need to be commended on their hard work. Ensuring access to mission critical applications in the event of a catastrophic incident is of the highest priority for Initiative management. Every year we learn something new, which improves our planning capability. We look forward to participating in future exercises that protect our mutual businesses,” Schenendorf maintains.

“We were able to connect immediately,” notes Steven Mandell, VP, director of financial controls for Y&R’s SFS group. “It was basically seamless. We logged into all our systems and were able to access them and perform all our functions. The test was very successful,” he concludes.

“We did have one glitch in the BC test,” says DeSantis. “Due to a facilities issue, DARE and fax transmissions weren’t available until 5:45 pm on Saturday. DDS programmers were working on this problem, but it took time to diagnose and fix. We now know what the issue was, and have updated our documentation accordingly to avoid future occurrence.”

“A major change to this year's test is the new MPLS-based WAN infrastructure,” relates DeSantis. Late 2005, DDS’ WAN team started the process of converting its wide area network from a private frame relay architecture to a new multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) design. The driving reasons for this change were to simplify the business continuity restoration process, and to enhance the ability to handle larger bandwidth needs of future applications.

The conversion paid off at this year’s test when, at 9:30 pm Friday night, every client circuit was switched to the BC site at once, in a matter of seconds. "In previous years, DDS communication technicians and client IT personnel spent hours on Friday night and Saturday morning testing their connectivity and dialing up their ISDN lines. Now, network restoration is fully automatic. This was the first year that we had 100% of the participating clients up and active by 2:00 pm, and took no calls related to communications issues,” reports DeSantis.

“Rebuilding our systems at the BC site is a coordinated effort among many teams at DDS. The teams did a tremendous job coordinating with clients and vendors, and getting our backup systems online,” concludes DeSantis.