Spain's State Administration Selecting Continuity Software

Continuity Software announced that Spain's General Comptroller of the State Administration Office (Intervención General de la Administración del Estado, or IGAE) has selected its RecoverGuard software solution to ensure the continuous availability and protection of its critical data center operations.

IGAE is tasked with providing transparent, reliable, complete and independent accounting information concerning Spain's public administration. In light of the national importance of its services, and in line with its commitment to complete public transparency - including making its findings available online 24x7, the availability and protection of its information and applications is among its highest priorities. The production environment is based on Hitachi storage, UNIX and Windows servers (with increasing use of virtualization), and various database tools. Data protection is achieved via continuous replication between the two data centers, combined with point-in-time copies. Availability relies on the extensive use of local and geo-clustering, including Veritas Cluster Server, Microsoft Cluster Server and other SRM tools.

Given the criticality of its data center operations, the IGAE had defined RTO and RPO. However, it recognized that with daily changes to the IT environment (i.e., critical patches, updates, new storage allocation, server refresh, etc.), the readiness of the recovery environment needed to be continually re-verified. This was addressed by performing frequent, resource draining and potentially disruptive, manual DR testing and spot audits. However they knew that soon after any test was complete, and any gaps or vulnerabilities addressed, a change could be made to the production environment that could once again place its RPO and RTO objectives in jeopardy. A better solution needed to be found.

Market Experts Distribution S.L, an independent value-added distributor providing the market with IT solutions, introduced the company to Continuity Software's RecoverGuard HA and DR monitoring and management software. After careful review and testing, IGAE chose to deploy RecoverGuard as its HA and DR solution due to its ability to continually and non-disruptively scan its IT environment to find gaps and vulnerabilities; and then automatically alert the team via email and by sending alerts to its enterprise ticket management systems thereby enabling IGAE to address all potential issues long before any possible impact on business continuity. Furthermore, RecoverGuard provided IGAE with visualization and reports that enabled them to drill-down further into both current and previously discovered vulnerabilities/gaps in order to enhance SLA compliance, change and audit reporting, and change management analysis.

"Upon deployment, RecoverGuard virtually immediately demonstrated its value in its ability to improve our processes and readiness, and further maximize our IT efforts and investment," said Manuel Alonso, Head of IT Systems and Infrastructure of the Sub Directorate of Operations, IGAE. "Of course, the benefits have extended beyond this initial scan. Today, it continuously detects configuration gaps, prioritizes, and provides actionable reports. This allows the IGAE team to immediately mitigate risks, thus dramatically cutting the time and effort previously involved in identifying root-cause and maintaining a high-readiness state. With RecoverGuard in place, the uncertainty factor has been eliminated and we now feel confident that the IT infrastructure configuration is aligned with our RPO and RTO goals."

"Despite heavy investment in building and maintaining disaster recovery and high availability environments, many organizations are still struggling to ensure that their objectives are met in a consistent manner," said Gil Hecht, Founder and CEO, Continuity Software. "Given the criticality of its data center operations, IGAE defined strict HA and DR objectives which they recognized would be difficult to meet given the impossibility of HA/DR testing on a constant basis. By using Continuity Software's RecoverGuard, IGAE has been able to ensure its ability to meet its objectives and fully appreciate its IT investments and efforts."

In addition to RecoverGuard, IGAE has also deployed Continuity Software's DR Assurance Service which provides it with quarterly reports that summarize all events, configuration gaps and errors, as well as offers recommendations on how to further improve the efficiency and effectiveness of HA, data protection and DR readiness moving forward.