AWARDS & RECOGNITION
2008 Awards: Business Continuity
RECIPIENT:
Michigan - Enterprise Storage, Backup & Recovery
There are few projects that excite a CIO less than storage and backups, and yet these two components are the basis for nearly every disaster recovery plan and business continuity initiative ever conceived. They support the foundation of every IT organization by ensuring that primary data resources are continually intact, secure and available to serve citizens.
Using a combination of process, governance and cutting edge solutions, Michigan has reaped the cost benefits of a statewide storage and backup service. The enterprise storage environment was built in 2001 and consisted of only 300 hosts and 13TB. This installation base has now grown to over 2.4 petabytes and houses data from every state agency across the three hosting centers. A completely synchronous solution has been built and recovery of that data is measured in hours and minutes rather than weeks. The server population being backed up by the enterprise grew from 300 to a current count of 1,600 servers of various OS platforms.
This enterprise solution has made initiatives like email standardization a common statewide office platform and data center consolidation a reality. State teams have developed a full scale Information Lifecycle Management strategy that includes repeatable processes and maintained service levels with staffing ratios well below private sector benchmarks.
But the journey to this point was a rocky road. In a rush to complete consolidation, the state discovered the limits of its long-touted infrastructure were being pushed beyond capacity. Wholesale consolidation efforts strained the technical solutions and the employees that support those systems.
In response to these pressures and to accommodate the ever increasing data protection needs of the state's data, Michigan took a radically different approach to providing the vital service of backup and recovery by providing primary administrative project oversight and blending the use of offsite and onsite contracted technicians in a tightly-woven business to government technical support process. Using a true partnership model, Michigan has been able to provide a fully-managed, 7x24x365, server backup service.
Michigan has proven that the best approach is to utilize a Shared Enterprise Storage and Backup offering. The underlying benefits to the organization include the allowance for standardization of backup and recovery functions, tiered storage protection of citizen data based on Recovery Time Objectives/Recovery Point Objectives and a centralized robust storage environment using the foundation to ensure the protection of data now and well into the future.
....Ken Theis, CIO and Director, Department of Information Technology, State of Michigan
FINALISTS:
Click on the title to download program submission.
California
Computer Aided Dispatch System
Minnesota
Minnesota Health-Related Licensing Boards Continuation of Operations Plan
OTHER NOMINATIONS:
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Delaware
Delaware's COOP Project
North Carolina
State of North Carolina Western Data Center--Planning and Construction for Best Practices in DR and BCP
Nebraska
Mobile Disaster Recovery Communications System
Utah
Ensuring Continuity of Service for Critical Public Safety Applications
