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Building Resiliency Into Disaster Recovery
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Aerospace
- Automotive
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Discrete Manufacturing
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
The Challenge
Textron, a multi-industry company, needed to plan for disaster recovery and business continuity. The company needed to understand how much resiliency it needed for any business continuity or crisis scenario. This required engaging business leaders and asking tough questions about worst-case scenarios. The company needed to consider all aspects of recovery, beginning with a roadmap of critical assets and obscure dependencies. The company also needed to assess the hardware and software required to restore those applications and test recovery plans to validate that recovery goals could be met.
About The Customer
Textron is a multi-industry company headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island. The company is known for brands such as Beechcraft, Bell Helicopter, Cessna, E-Z-GO, and Jacobsen. The company operates in various industries, including aerospace and automotive. Textron is a large enterprise with a significant number of employees and a wide range of operations. The company has a diversified manufacturing enterprise with autonomous operating divisions.
The Solution
Textron partnered with IBM for resiliency planning to provide contingencies for a multitude of interruptions in business operations. The partnership with IBM gave Textron the flexibility to adjust resiliency strategies as business needs changed. Architectural alternatives included cloud, shared floor space, dedicated recovery techniques, and hybrid availability solutions. IBM provided replication on an enterprise-wide basis, offering geographic redundancy and resiliency to the local backups completed in each of Textron's business regions. If recovery were ever necessary, Textron could switch over to IBM hardware to run any part of its enterprise. Three times a year, the company did a practice run at IBM’s fully hardened recovery site in Boulder, Colorado.
Operational Impact
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