Business Impact Analysis (Oil & Gas)

The client is a large, multi-national exploration company: they have many sites in remote locations with limited IT resources and restricted bandwidth. A company-wide IT Disaster Recovery policy was being developed and our consultant was asked to advise specifically on appropriate solutions for these remote sites.

Our consultant conducted interviews with representatives of all areas of the business to identify their IT requirements in the event of an incident. The analysis revealed that there were 2 broad groups of IT systems:

• Operational systems such as email which would be required in the immediate aftermath of an incident but which generated relatively small volumes of data; and
• Geological systems that generate large volumes of data - whilst the cost of permanently losing this data was large, access to the data would not be required for a period of time.

Our consultant was therefore able to propose a cost-effective IT recovery solution that restricted expensive replication solutions to the small number of systems that would be required in the immediate recovery phase of an incident. The vast majority of data, including the valuable geological data, could simply be backed-up and stored off-site. Specific recommendations were also made to improve the resilience of individual sites and thus reduce the likelihood of such contingencies being needed.