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Overview
DDS has and continues to provide a complete and annually tested Business Continuity (BC) plan. This plan includes provisions for a failure at DDS’ data center, any of the DDS office locations, or in DDS’ communications infrastructure.

DDS has contracted with IBM BRS for backup of all DDS equipment residing in our data center. DDS runs annual tests at the IBM BRS facility in Sterling Forest, NY. These are full-scale tests in which we run full production at the BRS site. DDS maintains a written and up-to-date plan describing all steps that need to be taken to bring the IBM BRS facility online.

Our goal is that within five hours of any emergency we will try to ascertain how long the emergency and service disruption will last and determine if we will be moving our operations to our Business Continuity site. That determination is based on numerous factors, depending on the extent of the emergency and what was affected.

Given the complexity of DDS’ operations, we have planning in place for numerous possible outages including communications, mainframe, printers, disk, storage, servers and various general facility issues. All of these require a different response depending on the severity.

If we are certain that functionality can be restored within five days, we will not be moving to the Business Continuity site, but will instead proceed with the work as soon as possible to restore service. If we cannot be back up in five days, we will immediately declare a disaster and implement the plans to move to the BC site.

Based on our drills and experience with IBM, we expect the majority of client sites and most major functions will be restored within 36-48 hours of declaring an emergency. However, it is possible that it may take up to 72 hours to be fully functional. If we do move to the BC site, all of your data from the previous day will be restored. Any data entered on the day of the emergency will be lost and will have to be re-entered.

DDS also maintains adequate Business Interruption and Extra Expense Insurance to be able to recover financially from a disaster and to pay for any extra costs associated with getting operations back to normal.