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 24×7, 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.