Corniche Events -  Business Continuity Case Study

Corniche Events has a long standing association with Wimbledon, the Grand Slam Tennis event held each year in June, and are contracted to provide the personnel for the transport service to get all players and officials to and from the event. The tournament is the culmination of twelve months of hard work for the directors and their team. Everything that they do is in preperation for the fortnight over which the event falls and ensuring that everything runs like clockwork is their ultimate goal. One slip up and Roger Federer could be left waiting at his logdings or Andy Murray is sat on the South Circular when they should be on Centre Court.

Corniche have used ITbuilder for their IT services for a number of years and during the summer of 2009 were very glad that they did. ITbuilder had advised them on their Business Continuity Services to back up its database of personnel, which is the life-blood of the business. Daily copies of this database along with shared folders of documents and Corniche's email database are uploaded daily to ITbuilder's data centre.

Ordinarily, the server hardware failing at Corniche would have been a tremendous problem, but for it to happen a couple days into the Wimbledon tournament, as it did in 2009, was an utter catastrophe. When the diagnosis of a failed server motherboard came in that afternoon, ITbuilder wasted no time and swung into action a disaster recovery plan knowing that a replacement board would be nigh on impossible to source at short notice. They built an online spare copy of Corniche's server on their virtual server cluster at the same data centre where the last System Snapshot and Remote Backups are stored. Working through that evening, the server was launched and the last good backup (from the night before) was restored and by midnight that evening, Corniche's server was back and running albeit some 50 miles away. The following morning, ITbuilder's support team logged onto the staff's systems in the office as well as the ones that reside at the Wimbledon event for the duration and connected them up to the Online Hot Spare Server.

Corniche were back in business and everything was ticking over as usual. Staff we able to function as normal and see out the remainder of the event. Once Wimbledon was finished for another year, Corniche Events continued to run on the Online Hot Spare Server for a number of weeks, mainly because this is still a very busy period for the company but also so that they could take stock and assess their options. A hasty decision taken in the heat of the moment could have unnecessary operational and cost implications further down the line. After consultation with ITbuilder a new server that was exactly right for their needs was installed in the office. Needless to say that this server also runs with ITbuilder Business Continuity Services.