Attenda Limited, the Always On Managed Services company, today announced that it has been chosen by APACS, the UK payments association, to provide a disaster recovery (DR) solution. A trade association of 31 members covering 97% of the total UK payments traffic volumes, APACS provides a forum through which financial institutions can address payment issues of common interest such as fraud.
"All of the UK clearing and payment systems are subject to formal oversight and have developed stringent security and back-up procedures" said Sue Yoe, Director of Technology, Information and Facilities at APACS. "It was an obvious step to extend this to the day-to-day operations of the association and ensure the safety of our electronic data. Planning was already underway when the terrorist attacks of last July took place. The subsequent disruption and uncertainty in central London underlined the fact that we were doing the right thing. We are also very keen to mitigate the risk of any accidental damage to our building, positioned as we are near to gas pipes and close to a future underground construction project."
Attenda is now managing a sizeable infrastructure which forms a dedicated DR solution for APACS. This would be invoked as part of APACS' overall Business Continuity Plan so that email, data and specialist applications would be available to APACS staff via remote access. In the event of a real crisis all employees could work from home. A disaster rehearsal with 50 selected employees will test the new system this summer and a complete emergency run-through with all staff will follow in the autumn.
"Attenda demonstrated a real understanding of the challenges we face and the role of DR in our wider Business Continuity Plan" continued Sue Yoe. "They also provided genuine flexibility; we began with a small number of servers and were able to add capacity as we needed it. Over the past nine months we have nearly doubled the number of servers that they are managing.
We were reassured by Attenda's compliance with ISO27001, the security management standard, and their obvious DR knowledge and capability. Through their real engagement with our issues we knew we could rely on them to respond in a crisis. We are now reviewing the implementation with Attenda and discussing our next priorities."
"All of the UK clearing and payment systems are subject to formal oversight and have developed stringent security and back-up procedures" said Sue Yoe, Director of Technology, Information and Facilities at APACS. "It was an obvious step to extend this to the day-to-day operations of the association and ensure the safety of our electronic data. Planning was already underway when the terrorist attacks of last July took place. The subsequent disruption and uncertainty in central London underlined the fact that we were doing the right thing. We are also very keen to mitigate the risk of any accidental damage to our building, positioned as we are near to gas pipes and close to a future underground construction project."
Attenda is now managing a sizeable infrastructure which forms a dedicated DR solution for APACS. This would be invoked as part of APACS' overall Business Continuity Plan so that email, data and specialist applications would be available to APACS staff via remote access. In the event of a real crisis all employees could work from home. A disaster rehearsal with 50 selected employees will test the new system this summer and a complete emergency run-through with all staff will follow in the autumn.
"Attenda demonstrated a real understanding of the challenges we face and the role of DR in our wider Business Continuity Plan" continued Sue Yoe. "They also provided genuine flexibility; we began with a small number of servers and were able to add capacity as we needed it. Over the past nine months we have nearly doubled the number of servers that they are managing.
We were reassured by Attenda's compliance with ISO27001, the security management standard, and their obvious DR knowledge and capability. Through their real engagement with our issues we knew we could rely on them to respond in a crisis. We are now reviewing the implementation with Attenda and discussing our next priorities."
