The Rector acknowledged that establishment of the Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Center (DR & BCC) takes KFUPM into a new era of operational security. Al-Sultan congratulated ITC for the pro-active effort and emphasized the importance of inculcating a risk-aware culture. Al-Sultan also encouraged ITC to further improve the business continuity efforts by engaging with other institutions such as King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) to ensure enhanced risk mitigation and data protection.
KFUPM () commissioned the Disaster Recovery Center to maintain the required level of critical IT services in case normal operations from the main Data Center are interrupted. While ITC has taken many steps over the years to “plan for the worst,” the establishment of this center represents a significant investment in bringing the university’s disaster recovery strategy in line with international best practices suitable for a large enterprise anywhere. It is essential to note that the DR & BCC is focused not only on saving the university’s data, but also on network and application functionality.
“By commissioning the ITC Business Continuity Center, we are ensuring continued access to critical applications such as e-Business, Banner, Databases, WebCT, E-mail etc., and protecting KFUPM from potentially significant losses — financial and otherwise — in the event of a major emergency, natural disaster or other disruption,” Sait said. “Should such an event occur, this dedicated facility will allow us to resume core operations off-site and day-to-day business will be taken care of in a cost-effective manner. Disaster recovery looks specifically at the technical aspects of how ITC can get back into operation using backup & restore facilities.”
The ITC Business Continuity facility is the result of hard work that began with the establishment of the Business Continuity Management Working Group in 2008. In August 2009, critical business processes were grouped according to priority and in May 2010, KFUPM’s business continuity strategy was completed with the inauguration of the center and project go-live. The second and third phases of the disaster recovery plan, which in part involve coordination with entities external to the university, will be completed within a year.
Sait pointed out that the first phase of the project was completed on time and on budget, and there were no expenses for external consultants. The only cost to the university was the purchase of hardware for the Business Continuity Center. He applauded the talent and ingenuity of KFUPM’s ICT staff in making the project a success.
IT at KFUPM has come a long way. Five years ago the university had just a mainframe, email, Internet access and a few independent applications. There was no disaster recovery plan at the university level. Then the direction was given that KFUPM’s IT must be bolstered to better support the Saudi research and education community. Today, the Dhahran campus hosts mission critical applications such as Oracle e-Business Suite, SunGard Banner, BI, HPC, campus-wide Wi-Fi and Students’ Dorms Network, WebCT, Symphony, OpenCourseWare, MedCare, faculty material on Web pages, the KFUPM Website, much bigger storage (100+ Terabytes), over 160 servers running critical applications and many mission critical databases.
Applications that are protected by disaster recovery replication include E-Business (applications and database server), Portal (LDAP for authentication and web servers), Banner, E-Mail, WebCT (database server only), Active Directory Domain Controllers and DNS and Enterprise LDAP (for the entire infrastructure). In order to keep costs down, switching from the main data center to the backup facility is manual, but with staff on duty round the clock, this was considered to be the more economically sensible choice.
“We are living in a riskier world and in general, business continuity is vital for every organization,” Sait said. “At KFUPM because the staff, academics and students rely on 24/7 uptimes for IT resources and services, the cost of failure far exceeds the cost of planning. Minimizing the effects of loss is only achievable through effective planning.”
