December - 20199GOVERNMENT CIO OUTLOOKEd Tonerthereby ensuring business operations could continue with the minimum impact to customers. While it seemed desirable to recover all applications as quickly as possible, the recovery process had to prioritize the most critical applications, or the ones that affected the largest number of citizens, like the mainframe. So the State of Nebraska implemented a design that allowed the mainframe to move from a primary site to a secondary one in the event of failure at either site. The Operations team proactively tested the design with some assistance from partner agencies. The test met the Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which was minutes, and the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) was zero. This result ensured the team that the citizens of Nebraska, in the event of an outage, would have access to business-critical applications with limited downtime and no data loss.With the primary focus on availability, a traditional Disaster Recovery site misses its mark. Critical applications must be accessible at all times for governments to effectively serve citizens. Application availability begins with network architecture, which is why Nebraska redesigned the network in recent consolidation efforts. The consolidated configuration now delivers high availability for citizens in the dynamic and agile 21st century.The moral of the previously-mentioned horror stories is, IT groups who are responsible for ensuring business continuity and data availability should provide confirmation of their plans through documented Disaster Recovery exercises. The reality is, delivering high availability of applications across multiple interdependent systems is an increasingly difficult task. One of the keys to the success of implementation of the framework relates to its ability to expand and contract as necessary
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