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Yorkshire Building Society - Creating a Business Continuity Strategy

SCC works closely with Yorkshire Building Society to develop an effective strategy for minimising the impact on business from the failure or loss of IT systems.  

“SCC involved us in all steps of the process with a combination of interviews and interactive workshops, which ensured that we fully understood and agreed with all proposed solutions”

Yorkshire Building Society is one of the UK’s most successful building societies with 178 branches and over 2 million members. As with all major financial institutions today, the availability and integrity of its IT services are crucial for the Yorkshire.

With business growing, new services being added and the increased importance of a 24 x 7 web presence for interacting with customers, the need to enhance the organisation’s Business Continuity Planning (BCP) processes to minimise disruption to the business was a top priority.

The Challenges of BCP

An organisation’s IT services can be affected by a wide variety of incidents. These include the;

• failure of individual technology components
• temporary loss of service due to system crashes
• loss of power or cooling
• complete destruction of the data centre caused by a major disaster

For the Yorkshire to determine an appropriate response to these different events, an in-depth assessment of the severity of the impact on the business in each case was required. In addition, any proposed solutions had to meet stringent recovery targets for the restoration of key services and data.

Faced with this challenge Phil Cottam, Head of Services and Strategy for the Society, asked HP to recommend a suitable IT partner to work with. “We chose SCC to help us create a BCP strategy for the future. Not only were they recommended by HP but they also had a successful track record of BCP projects supported by excellent references,” explains Phil.

The options available ranged from incremental enhancements to the existing infrastructure through to the implementation of a full disaster recovery facility, involving complete data centre replication with real time data synchronisation. SCC was asked to assess the current environment and produce a report that would scope the changes needed to meet the organisation’s BCP requirements, together with a breakdown of all costs.

The SCC Approach

As part of the programme to improve its readiness to cope with disastrous events, the Yorkshire had carried out a thorough Business Impact Assessment. This identified the IT services used in all business critical business processes and the associated recovery times required. Armed with this key information, SCC proceeded to identify any shortfalls in recovery capability and propose appropriate solutions using proven methodologies.

SCC’s approach to the development of an effective BCP strategy entails understanding the relationship between the ‘top-down’ business requirements and the ‘bottom-up’ IT architecture view. A dependency model can then be created that clearly defines the relationship between IT system components and the business processes that depend on them.

Using the dependency model they had built, SCC’s consultants were able to produce a gap analysis identifying the systems that did not meet the necessary recovery times. They then worked closely with the Society to create designs for new systems to address the shortfalls, making extensive use of virtualisation techniques for improved resilience.

Working with SCC

“SCC involved us in all steps of the process with a combination of interviews and interactive workshops, which ensured that we fully understood and agreed with all proposed solutions,” reports Phil. “This collaborative approach was invaluable in achieving buy-in from the organisation for this major programme of work.”

The IT Maturity methodology used by SCC is a formal approach to measuring an IT operation’s capability and alignment with business objectives and evaluates aspects such as flexibility, responsiveness and service quality. The aim is to ensure that all parts of the IT environment are performing at comparative maturity levels. Unless they are, the overall capability of the infrastructure is compromised.

The service provided by SCC included delivering a detailed cost analysis of the upgrade. This gave the Society’s management a clear view of the investment needed to achieve the desired recovery targets.

The Next Steps

Yorkshire decided to proceed with the proposed upgrade to its IT infrastructure. This entailed a large and complex programme of work encompassing upgrades to IT systems and a new Disaster Recovery (DR) capability. It also included additional building facilities, involving many in-house and third party organisations, and full documentation of the processes.

“We asked SCC to undertake the overall management of this critical programme because of the expertise their people had shown in the requirement analysis and solution design phase,” says Phil. “They have established an excellent working relationship with us and clearly demonstrated their willingness to go the extra mile.”

With SCC providing programme and project management, plus technical leadership, implementation was completed successfully on budget and on time. Yorkshire now has a modern, resilient and flexible IT infrastructure with DR capabilities that meet its stringent recovery targets.