Data Restoration

Civil Society Media, formerly Plaza Publishing, is a specialist publishing house that produces magazines, websites and bespoke research projects within the civil society – charity sector.After dramatic hardware failure (a failed hard disk controller) left their communications, application sand therefore their business crippled, London Data were asked to get the company’s IT back on its feet after previous oversights in disaster recovery management meant that there were significant gaps in the restoration plan. After eventually restoring and recreating the servers and network to full working order we were asked to managetheir systems and ensure this never happened again.

Working within the budget of the organisation, the accepted proposal was precise and efficient without sacrificing the security of the data or stability and viability of the IT system. The existing network was not out-dated or under specification and in fact only small changes to the server hardware was required.The final solution was multifaceted, including creating multiple state of the art back-up sets in order to simplify and accelerate any necessary restoration in the future. Automatic fail-safes have been employed such as disk mirroring and the setting up of secondary servers to handle DNS and DHCP, so in the event of primary services being unreachable the system behind kicks in.

A second internet connection has also been installed to allow users to access WAN resources independently of the exchange connection, and hot spares of critical server components have been made available and are kept on site so that they can be installed within a few moments.Implementation of remote monitoring tools enables us to keep track of how much hard disk space is available or how fast the internet connections are and target individual services and applications to provide London Data with an early warning system so granular that we can detect a problem and even fix it before Civil Society notices.