Acuma, an approved supplier of professional services to this major mobile telecommunications business, undertook a consultative project to determine and standardize the business continuity and disaster recovery requirements of the customer such that upon analysis of the business impact incurred by the unavailability of any one service, a standard disaster recovery solution could be specified by the IT team. The resultant mapping was delivered to the customer in the form of a software tool that allows rapid analysis of business impact and the automated generation of the preferred technical disaster recovery architecture to meet the requirement.

The project was divided into two distinct streams of analysis, one with the business stakeholders to understand the business continuity requirements and business impact metrics and to standardize the measurement of these, and a second to work closely with the technical architecture team to design a set of generic, platform independent architectures with their varying capabilities in terms of recoverability. Acuma consultants then determined a methodology whereby the former could be mapped to the latter on the basis of clearly determined metrics, allowing the business and technical users to come to agreement about the required level of disaster recovery capability for any service under discussion. This process can be repeated across all services within the customer operation producing a standardization of solution, resulting in predictable capital expenditure and reduced operational cost when compared to multiple bespoke implementations.