| For the twelfth year in a row, DDS has successfully completed its annual business continuity test on April 19, 2008. The business continuity test is a major undertaking. Over 80 DDS employees devote their weekend to the endeavor, relocating to a remote site to build our data center from scratch. Personnel from 18 different departments work together to ensure that DDS can recover business for its clients in the event of an emergency.
This year’s test included participants from DDS’ North American media buying and media sales client base. During the test, clients repeat transactions they conducted the previous week and confirm that the results received match the previous week’s activity.
The team effort begins at 8:00 am the day before the test, and concludes at 8:00 am the day after the test. It involves configuring a mainframe computer, establishing a communications network, loading client data for all systems from backup files, and loading historic demographic data from the past 20 years.
This year, the mainframe and network infrastructure was established in record time. According to plan, online applications and communication lines were made available to clients from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm on the test day.
Clients sent more than 73,000 transactions through our media buying systems and more than 6,000 through our media sales systems, successfully conducting a total of more than 79,000 electronic transactions. There were no interruptions in service throughout the test.
Clients also sent 448 electronic faxes and generated more than 1,600 reports (292 “Soon” reports and 1,375 overnight reports). DDS printed and delivered to our clients 15,000 pages of reports. Our Client Application Services (CAS) support center also answered client calls and opened more than 20 tickets across all systems.
Business operations in our New York data center were restored quickly and were available to our clients the following day, in keeping with our regularly scheduled system hours.
“We have a comprehensive Business Continuity Plan, which includes detailed instructions for setting up a remote data center for disaster recovery. Every year we hone our procedures, based on our experiences during the business continuity test. This plan has proven itself once again, with the fastest ever setup of our mainframe and network during a business continuity test,” says Frank DeSantis, DDS’ director of Operations.
“Overall the test was very successful. We do want to improve upon our processes for MediaOcean clients, who participated in the test for the first time. One specific issue we’d like to address is enabling DARE for transactions between trading partners. Since we were concerned that trading partners outside the test might mistake test transactions for actual transactions, we made the decision to disable the DARE dispatcher piece. Our goal for next year is to enable this capability between trading partners,” states DeSantis.
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