See also:

A message from Alan Hutton, president of FundSERV: Reducing risk is an integral part of FundSERV's mission

Disaster planning: Part of the new business as usual

New CFO recalls logic behind FundSERV

Coyotes face biggest test

Changes at FundSERV

Production freeze dates

FundSERV Network Performance

All articles

With a strategic goal of removing risk, time and cost from customer business interactions, FundSERV continually strives to identify and strengthen its links to and between industry participants.

However, when it comes to complex computing and telecommunications networks, hardware failures and network outages are a fact of life. Somewhere, sometime, a component will fail. Given the inevitability of a failure, the issue then becomes one of recovery or better yet, uninterrupted continuity.

A significant new initiative is now underway to drive increased reliability of the FundSERV network and extend FundSERV's business continuity strategy out to customer premises. The initial goal is uninterrupted connectivity for all high and medium volume customers via a second or "redundant" telecommunications link between the customer and the FundSERV network.

Funds have been proposed for the project in the 2007 budget with a phased implementation over 18 months. Upgrades to existing customer infrastructure are being prioritized by transaction volume and value. FundSERV will own, operate and make available for audit all equipment used to provide the failover link.

In the event of a telecommunications or hardware failure in the primary connection, data traffic would automatically be switched over to the second link without interruption or human intervention. This traffic would then be routed to FundSERV's primary site or, depending on the location of the failure, to FundSERV's disaster recovery facility.

There are many benefits to implementing the dual connectivity strategy, including:

• prevention of outages during critical transaction windows at the customers' premises and FundSERV locations
  
  
• elimination of time-consuming business continuity "workarounds" during outages when resources are limited
  
  
• encryption of all new dedicated connections
  
  
• increased connectivity to FundSERV's disaster recovery facility.

"This is a complex project requiring a fair amount of planning for both FundSERV and our customers," says Alex von Tiesenhausen, FundSERV director of networking. "It's a necessary next step in protecting our customers and ourselves, and with recent decreases in telecommunications costs, we believe the effort is justified."

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