Spectacular - Business Data Disaster Recovery

Spectacular – Business Data Disaster Recovery

Background

Spectacular is one of the top players for indoor and outdoor advertising in the Romanian market. With over 8000 digital assets, it has an extensive service network to cover digital artwork design and printing, publishing and monitoring for the digital assets’ content.

Problem Definition

In Spring of 2014, Spectacular’s business has been severely affected by a sudden and unexpected hardware failure that affected the core business data storage units.
Acrom has been quickly recommended by an existing customer as the appropriate company to have this severe matter resolved, and consequently it has requested immediate on-site support for data recovery and business restoration.

Acrom Response

Acrom offered prompt support in a crisis situation and made sure services were fully restored to the pre-crash state. During this process, Acrom has performed a full review and a thorough analysis of the hardware defect, as the in-house built solution was no longer supported, identified the root-cause of it, and took the necessary steps to bring the service functionality back. Service has been restored by replacing out-of support hardware components with supported parts that guarantee the functionality of the in-built machine. Data contained in the affected components has been recovered by an IT specialist in data and system recovery. After hardware and data restoration, full functionality was again re-established. Due to the extensive experience that Acrom has in the field of Disaster Recovery,  the service restoration has been performed quickly and effectively, although it had no previous background over the IT components and functionality of Spectacular. Moreover, as a true business partner, Acrom has offered restoration services outside local business hours.

Post incident, Acrom has been tasked to perform an internal audit of the IT infrastructure to determine any other such hidden risks that can bring the business to a halt. The audit has included servers, network, internal LAN, technical assistance process for end-users, licensing, applications and integrations, data flows, computer fleet, technical limitations and potential, back-up systems, analysis of existing issues and the impact of all components over the business. The audit inspection has underlined the gaps and possible risks that an unbalanced IT structure might have over the business as a whole and identified the possible areas of improvement based on industry’s best practices and business profile. These recommendations will greatly help avoiding major incidents in the future, it will set the IT infrastructure to a state in which it can better support the business and the company’s future development.

Conclusions

In summary, Acrom has executed for results, targeting for a number of business relevant objectives.

Objectives:

• Offer best quality support with a short-time notice and without customer background.
• Immediately plan for service restore: hardware replacement, improving functionality, understand service purpose and availability of resources.
• Evaluate current state of IT services and propose service optimization and abridgement of unnecessary and highly cost resources.
• Plan for a self-sustainable and structured support model.

Results:

• Quick real-time response to a significant hardware issue.
• Replacement of hardware, recovering data and restore of service.
• Assistance with data back-up and recovery.
• Audit on Spectacular’s IT environment.
• Proposal for process & systems improvement short, mid and long term.