GlobalSCAPE : Do You Have a Disaster Recovery Plan?

Don't learn about disaster recovery (DR) the hard way. Just a single, brief outage taught one healthcare organization about the effects that it can have on the business as a whole. While almost every other system in their organization had a DR plan, their secure data exchange solution, Enhanced File Transfer (EFT) SMB was overlooked. The organization reached out to Globalscape immediately to investigate the options available to them. After thorough discussions between features and cost, a good middle ground was found.

What are my options?

Globalscape's EFT platform can be deployed in different ways, based off of need or cost, including:

• Active-Standby - An active-standby deployment has one EFT server in the production network processing all transactions, with an identical standby instance of EFT ready to go in case of disaster. In this deployment, the administrator must manually switch over to the standby EFT.
• Active-Passive - In an active-passive deployment, two identical instances of EFT are installed in a cluster configuration with a third-party cluster manager, such as Microsoft cluster manager. If the active server goes down, the cluster manager automatically 'fails over' to the passive server to continue uninterrupted service while the formerly active server is repaired.
• Active-Active - An active-active deployment includes three or more EFT servers and a load balancer, and data is processed by all EFT servers in a round-robin fashion, for always on, high availability.

Preparation is key

With the realization that their file transfer needs had evolved, the healthcare organization moved forward with an upgrade from their EFT SMB edition to EFT Enterprise, deploying an Active-Standby instance. Through the Active-Standby deployment of EFT Enterprise, the health care organization was prepared for any threats of downtime or outages. The active-standby instance of EFT allowed the organization to have a redundant safety net, while keeping the budget within scope.

Once the deployment model was decided upon, the next discussion was how to migrate the Enterprise and SMB editions to the client. The organization could not afford a lengthy downtime for migration, so they decided to bring in Globalscape's Professional Services team to perform the migration for them. With the experienced staff and Professional Services tools, the Globalscape team was able to migrate both production instances of SMB and Enterprise and combine the existing configurations for a seamless migration. Using our EFT Migration Tool to 'push' the configuration from one computer to the other allowed the configuration to replicate to the standby node and be ready, should a disaster occur.

After finalizing the upgrade, the customer was extremely pleased with the added feature set-and the peace of mind-that came with EFT Enterprise and an Active-Passive configuration. They also added Platinum Support to have access to our support team 24x7.

If you're ready to prevent disaster with your secure data exchange solutions, contact your account manager or go to https://www.globalscape.com/support for assistance.