Dear Member,

The next session of the Coalface Community will be breakfast sessions held in Sydney onWednesday May 25th and in Melbourne on Thursday May 26th. 

Topic: Lessons learned from a real-life disaster recovery experience – the insights gained when a comprehensive, and independently audited, disaster recovery plan had to be activated to deal with a real-time threat to the data centre.

The case history is being presented by Shane Kuret, the General Manager, Information Technology at ME Bank.

One Saturday afternoon in 2007 Shane Kuret received an unexpected call from one of his reports. It began with the words “I’m standing in the dark in a smoke filled data centre and I’m scared”. This presented ME Bank with a golden opportunity to activate its rigorously tested, thoroughly documented, independently audited, regulatory compliant, disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BCP) plans. Shane confidently reported to his management that he expected things would be back to normal in about four hours. Seventeen hours later, as Saturday evening rolled in to Sunday morning, he began to understand the important differences between a practice run of a DR plan and instigating it in earnest with the clock ticking in a real-time crisis. While any immediate disaster was eventually averted this episode highlighted the major deficiencies that existed in ME Bank’s DR and BCP arrangements and the large and very real risks the business faced. Shane warned his CEO of these risks and immediately secured significant monies to address them.

In this briefing Shane will outline what led to him activate the DR plan and how he now has a much fuller appreciation of what can constitute a potential disaster to an IT department. He will then explain the major differences he encountered between undertaking a practice run of the DR plan and when implementing it in a real-life situation and the significant problems these differences created. He will also highlight the unexpected “gotchas” that took him by surprise. Finally, he will outline how, where and why he has subsequently invested to enhance ME Bank’s IT infrastructure and recovery processes to improve its DR and BCP arrangements. More recently this entails implementing an active-active datacenter set up which includes the ability to cluster a production database across the two data centres and concurrently write transactional data at both sites while retaining full data consistency.

$contact_account_name may send three delegates. Many of you may feel confident in the robustness of your DR and BCP arrangements. Nevertheless, I would still encourage you to be represented. The evidence over the last few months has been that many high profile and prestigious organisations have experienced significant issues with their DR and BCP plans. ME Bank’s experiences will offer you the real-life insights of how and where DR plans can go wrong and what steps you can take to avoid these traps. As such, if eliminating IT downtime is important to your organisation the session promises to provide invaluable pointers of how you can better protect these vital resources. Moreover, the session will actively encourage discussion and debate on why these shortcomings existed, how they could have been avoided and the thoroughness of the approach and enhancements subsequently made to its DR plans by ME Bank. Moreover, if you have other items that you would particularly like the meeting to discuss, please send your questions to me at phind@coalfacecommunity.com.au.

For catering and seating purposes we need to know who will be attending the session byFriday May 20th. Please let me know the delegates from your organisation by completing this online registration form. 

Sincerely

Peter Hind 
Director 
Coalface Community