Case Studies: Anthony Wayne Services

Company Background:

AWS is a human service agency serving people with disabilities. Its development began in 1957 when a community volunteer committee, that would ultimately become the United Way of Allen County, launched a study to consider the provision of work-related services for individuals with disabilities. From that study, the Community Coordinating Center for Rehabilitation and Health Services, Inc. was founded in 1960. By 1972 steady growth, both in terms of programs provided and in numbers of people served, prompted the agency's name change to Anthony Wayne Rehabilitation Center for the Handicapped and Blind, Inc., a designation that reflected the primary focus of our work at the time.

Today, AWS provides a wide variety of Adult and Child centered services in 5 states (Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, and New Mexico). Their services and programs include workshops that provide training and development of job skills, employment services for those looking to work in the community, supported living and group homes, day services, home health and therapies for infants diagnosed with developmental disabilities.

The Challenge:
Wise use of technology is one of the key factors which allow AWS to provide and maintain such a wide variety services and programs over such as large geographical area of five states. AWS has invested in systems which allow staff and management to access client records, document social and clinical services provided, capture time entries, process billings, and maintain 360 degree communications through voice, email, faxes, and other collaboration tools.

As AWS has grown to depend more and more on real-time technology for its daily operations, it became apparent to the leadership team that the organization needed to take the appropriate steps to ensure their key systems were protected by a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuation Plan.

The Solution:
ENS worked closely with AWS to help the organization with developing a comprehensive Disaster Recovery plan which ultimately resulted in a co-located fail-over site to provide mission critical technology functions to all locations in the event the datacenter located at corporate headquarters suffered a declared emergency.

The Process:
ENS acted as the project manager and coach for this project and assisted the AWS team with following our four proven steps to developing an effective plan.

1. Project Initiation

Define Scope and Assumptions
Obtain Top Management Commitment
Establish Planning Committees and Team

2. Analysis and Assessment

Risk and Business Impact Assessment

3. Collection and Design

Establish Process Priorities
Determine Recovery Strategies
Perform Data Collection
Organize and Document Plan

4. Execution

Develop Testing Criteria
Test and Approve the Plan

ENS met with the AWS Executive Team to help establish the project scope and explain the process. From there, the Executive Team selected Jim Palmer (Manager, Information Technology) to be the primary AWS contact for this project.

The ENS team provided Jim with forms and training to gather information from each of AWS’s departments as to what technologies they used on a daily bases. This information was then used to help identify which technologies were either mission critical, maintained revenue streams, were government regulated, or impacted contract compliance. The resulting data was pulled together; tabulated and summarized; and resulted in establishing a series of benchmarks (ethically, financially, contractually, and compliancy) the Executive Team could use to determine their threshold for potential downtime caused by a disaster.

The Executive Team determined any downtime from a disaster had to be measured in hours, not days or weeks. Due to the size and complexity of different technologies being leveraged by AWS, building an emergency fail-over site and utilizing data replication from the datacenter was determined to be the correct course of action.

The Technical Aspect:
The ENS consultants and engineers worked with the AWS team to design a solution for the fail-over site which could provide the critical functions identified in the “Analysis and Assessment” portion of the project until the datacenter could recover or be rebuilt. The final configuration consisted of a combination of physical and virtual servers to provide for email, the main line business applications, and telephony functions. Application and e-mail data is perpetually replicated through the wide-area network. Users from all locations will access the fail-over site using Citrix Metaframe through preconfigured software and hardware VPN’s using Cisco switches, routers, and firewalls.

Finishing and Maintaining the Plan:
The ENS consultants worked with Jim and his team to develop the outline for the plan’s written documentation, which they then used to create the final documentation. ENS regularly meets with AWS to review the Disaster Recovery Plan and compare how it aligns with the organization’s technology infrastructure in order to identify any changes that may be required to the plan, the associated documentation, or the fail-over site.