About the Company

Founded in 1980, with close to $1 billion in annual revenue, this company is a technology company, owns and operates intelligent commerce networks connecting offline and online transactions in real time for retailers, manufacturers, trading partners, and service providers across various industries. As a trusted company for over 40 years, this company has helped retailers, manufacturers, healthcare providers, governments, and employers redefine innovation, as well as help leading Fortune 5000 companies and emerging brands stay relevant and propel growth. 

The Challenge

As part of this company’s ongoing operations as a business they must have contingency plans in case of a disaster. Each IT group must know what their sequence of events must be, who does what, when, how and the impact of their tasks during a disaster. This is why the team regularly conducts Disaster Recovery (DR) execution.

Their DR process starts with a declaration of a disaster. By design and on purpose the team ensures that the timing of the exercise is not leaked and is a surprise, to measure the effectiveness of the teams response time and response processes. 

Historically, not having a central documentation of resources and dependencies of applications made it difficult for the networking, server and applications teams to understand quickly the impact of the disaster and the results of their actions. And the disaster recovery process was not optimal. 

The Solution

This company looked to Device42 for help. The team needed to ensure that every IT team relied on a single, and most accurate set of data and information, not just for the DR exercises, but also for if an actual disaster was to take place. 

“Device42 is really critical for us, because we store all of our service account information, all the admin accounts, validation IPs, and other resources in Device42. We literally, from an infrastructure standpoint, can’t tell you how many teams are relying on Device42.” 

–  Incident Manager, Platform Engineering-Shared Service

The Impact

As a result of deploying Device42, the company has been able to reduce the amount of days to recover from a major disaster from 7 days to 2-3 days. And from having 65+ people involved to down to 25 people. Since all the information needed to recover from a disaster is stored in near real-time in Device42, and represents actual infrastructure data, each team has to get fewer people involved in the DR process. For example, the server team will involve 2-3 people, as opposed to 5-6 before, and the application teams and other teams also can involve less people. 

One of the company’s achievements was that they were able to conduct a DR during COVID when most people were working from home. 

“When the pandemic hit, we were able to do an actual declaration and an actual execution of our business continuity plan where we were able to have everybody work remotely and execute that within 48 hours. Device42 helped with that.” 

– Sr. Infrastructure Project Manager/Business Continuity Manager