With Hurricane Season Looming, Businesses Begin Safety Preparations And Planning

Businesses and organizations located in high hurricane risk areas do not have the luxury of preparing in case a hurricane occurs – they must prepare for when a hurricane will hit. For Arch Reinsurance Ltd, a global provider of reinsurance products headquartered in Bermuda, hurricane season represents an immense threat to their business. This does not just entail stocking up on flashlights and batteries, but also protecting critical business systems to ensure that they stay up and running and are protected from potential downtime and data loss. While these storms make frequent attempts at stealing the company’s digital assets, downtime and data loss would be devastating for Arch Reinsurance Ltd. In response, the company has implemented a first-class disaster recovery and business continuity plan to keep its business operations up and running.

Sheridan Smith, Information Technology Manager at Arch Reinsurance Ltd, first implemented a disaster recovery plan for the company in 2006. After investigating several solutions, Smith chose Double-Take Availability from Double-Take® Software (NASDAQ: DBTK) and began working with Bill Baldwin, an implementation system engineer from Double-Take Software’s FailSafe program, to develop a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plan. From the very outset the plan covered Arch Reinsurance’s Microsoft Exchange environment as well as numerous other critical legacy and SQL servers including Great Plains and file and print services. Their operations are located in two physical production sites in Bermuda which send data to another secured site where they can run operations in the event of disaster. In addition, Arch Ltd uses Double-Take Availability to replicate the same critical servers to target servers in-house for local high availability.

“Every year in May and July, Bill visits our office to perform upgrades and failover testing, and to discuss how we can continue to improve our disaster recovery and business continuity plan to insure that we are equipped for the upcoming hurricane season,” said Smith. “With Bill’s help, and with Double-Take® Availability, we are able to prepare for any type of hurricane or disaster. This type of planning and protection really helps me sleep at night, and enables our IT team to focus on additional areas requiring our attention.”

“As evident in our continued partnership with Arch Reinsurance Ltd., our professional services program strives to become an extension of an organization’s IT team, working cohesively and providing advice on implementing specific technologies and strategies to meet each company’s individual needs,” said Baldwin. “Double-Take Software’s professional services team is focused on providing businesses and organizations with advice and assistance year in and year out to implement, test and advance their disaster recovery plan and strategy and meet their unique and specific needs.”