Case Study
Corporate Data Warehouse Disaster Recovery Exercise
Risk Technology
Client
Fortune 50 Financial Institution
Services
Technology Infrastructure, Business Resilience
Project Overview
To improve overall business resiliency and ensure ongoing preparedness to execute defined recovery plans for key enterprise data stores, the Client stood-up a disaster recovery program for its Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW). The scope of the program also covered the need to comply with new regulatory requirements focused on ensuring safety and soundness of critical financial data. Reference Point helped assess and manage the business resiliency operation for CDW, including the planning for and execution of business resiliency exercises over four separate weekends. Preparation focused on identifying dependencies, defining reusable validation activities, and executing effective cross-organization communications to ensure smooth and trouble-free exercises. Based on the success of the CDW business resiliency efforts, the Client achieved short-term success in meeting program goals and regulatory obligations as well as long-term benefits with a proven, repeatable and standardized business resiliency approach for other business groups to utilize.
Solution
Reference Point deployed a focused team, including a senior technical program manager and risk consultant, to help drive forward the end-to-end business resiliency exercise for CDW, including pre-exercise preparation through exercise close-out.
RP oversaw the completion of >40 pre-exercise artifacts and activities before each of the four disaster recovery exercises. Examples include preparation of validation cases and readiness checklists as well as coordination with dependent business groups.
The team also planned for and managed disaster recovery exercises across four weekends. A comprehensive communications strategy was implemented to communicate with all relevant parties and coordinate business validations. Each exercise was ultimately closed out with a lessons learned meeting and a results report, compiled by the Reference Point team.
Following the completion of the four disaster recovery exercises, Reference Point developed a repeatable Planned and Unplanned Business Resiliency Framework for the Client based off the lessons learned from leading the CDW group.
Impact
The Client achieved all target metrics for the four disaster recovery exercises, providing evidence both internally and to external regulators that CDW business resiliency capabilities were aligned to internal and industry standards.
Overall effort for CDW progressed with minimal negative impacts to other dependent business groups which can be attributed to the pre-exercise dependency analysis driven by Reference Point.
The Client identified communication as a strength in lessons learned meetings, after initially being identified as an area for improvement in the Client’s prior Business Resiliency efforts.
Leveraging the Business Resiliency Frameworks developed during the CDW exercise, the Client can decrease preparation time for future disaster recovery events and provide a standardized approach for use by other business groups.
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