Disaster Management
Given the sensitive and critical nature of our IT-enabled business operations, VFS Global has deployed a Disaster Recovery (DR) set-up for its IT infrastructure to provide a robust, reliable platform for 24/7 availability of software applications. Our DR plan for IT readiness revolves around key IT Infrastructure investments, defined processes, policies and standard operating procedures. One of the key elements of this plan is our DR site which serves as an alternate site for IT applications available to the businesses and operations teams, in case of unexpected failure.
All IT solutions at VFS Global have been designed to run on centralised platforms with easy, secure web-based access. Cutting-edge web application technology enables applicants, customers and our VACs around the world to access applications real-time 24/7. These applications are hosted on servers, co-located at the two data centres (DCs), located in different countries, in geographically diverse zones.
Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan
VFS Global's DR plan caters to the following situations:
- Disaster strike at the primary DCs such as power outage, terrorist attack, explosion, earthquake, floods etc.
- Non-availability of the servers due to any local problem such as network, power outage, etc. at either of the two data centres
- Provisioning scalability and providing business continuity
Always Prepared
Some measures implemented as part of VFS Global's DR plan include the following:
- Local mirrors of systems and/or data and use of disk protection technology, such as Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID)
- Local server and network redundancy by way of clustered solutions and spares and prevention of any incidence of Single Point of Failure (SPOF)
- Regular log-shipping/Structured Query Language(SQL) synchronisations of databases between both sites to ensure high availability with defined Recovery Point Objective (RPO)/ Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
- Back-ups taken on tapes and sent off-site at regular intervals
- Use of Storage Area Network(SAN) based technologies to ensure high availability systems
- Virtualization of servers for better recovery times in the event of a disaster
Key Benefits
- Proven and tested solutions
- High availability of both application and database
- Better data management
- Scalability for future business expansion
- Provision of business continuity
Asif Ahmad
HM Ambassador, British Embassy, Bangkok, Thailand
Kingsley Magee
Regional Operations Manager, UKBA, Manila, Philippines
Belgium, VFS Global extend visa service delivery to six locations across India
Travel Biz Monitor, April 2013
Zubin Karkaria appointed on Executive Board of Kuoni Group
Indiainfoline.com, March 2013
