EVP Systems is proud to announce that we have successfully completed a full business continuity and disaster recovery drill, encompassing the company’s entire technical and physical infrastructure. In the event of a disaster at either of our California offices or at the Data Center in Virginia, we are capable of continuing to do business without interruption.
Data Center
EVP Systems maintains two active instances of our Data Center, the servers and databases that EstateVal and the other EVP Office applications get data from. The two physically disparate instances run in parallel, in separate Amazon Web Services Availability Zones. If either side becomes unavailable, the other automatically takes the full load, and is capable of providing pricing at full capacity.
The Data Center failover is tested quarterly, and the details — as well as a history of test results — is available in our “Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity” documentation.
Woodland Hills
On Friday, June 29th, the employees from our Woodland Hills, California, office (the Support and Professional Services Departments) reported to an off-site location, and successfully performed all their duties. This exercise simulated a disaster at the office, when access would be unavailable.
Each department had nothing with them from the office, and were given new laptops that had the standard EVP Systems configuration freshly installed. The fax line that terminates in the Woodland Hills office was redirected to the new location. No client disruption was caused.
(EVP Systems hosts as much of its infrastructure as possible in the cloud, including Google for e-mail and document sharing, Microsoft Azure for workstation authentication and Microsoft Office licensing, and Dropbox for file sharing. This allows a properly configured laptop with an Internet connection to effectively function anywhere.)
Santa Barbara
Between Thursday, August 23 and August 27, 2018, our Santa Barbara headquarters (consisting of the Accounting, Sales, and Administrative Departments) was closed to simulate a disaster, and the employees reported to another off-site location. Similar to Woodland Hills, they had nothing from the office with them, and were issued freshly configured workstations. The main switchboard was routed to the off-site location at the telecom provider.
As with Woodland Hills, the transition to another location and new hardware was seamless. No client disruption occurred.
Summary
With these exercises, EVP Systems has successfully demonstrated that if any of our locations are compromised — whatever the cause — we can continue to serve our clients. In the event of a legitimate disaster, the company’s first priority is the safety of our employees, but once that is established, we are capable of carrying on all of our primary business functions without disruption.
If you have questions about EVP Systems business continuity and disaster recovery plans, please don’t hesitate to contact our Support Department, at support@evpsys.com or (818) 313-6300.