Mutual & Federal, a leading insurance company in southern Africa, has contracted SafeGuard iT to provide it with business continuity services in the event of a disruption, thereby ensuring availability of its customer data, systems and services.
"Business continuity is vital for any responsible organisation, especially an organisation that is data-oriented such as Mutual & Federal. It is imperative that our core activities are always available for our customers," explains Gary Benton, Group Secretary for Mutual & Federal.
"After a thorough assessment, we decided that SafeGuard iT`s facilities, and its local and international expertise provided the best solution to manage and deliver the business continuity service we required," adds Benton. "We look forward to having a long-term relationship with SafeGuard iT."
With access to SunGard`s expertise, SafeGuard iT will provide Mutual & Federal with stable business operations based on proven international best practice, to ensure exactly the right contingency measures that will safeguard Mutual & Federal in the event of system failure.
"Mutual & Federal`s top priority is its customers," states Bernard Vertenten, MD of SafeGuard iT, a JV between the AST Group and US-based SunGard. "Therefore continuity issues are becoming crucial to organisations, which need to ensure that procedures and policies are in place to meet their customers` expectations or fear losing them in the event of downtime in their facilities."
SafeGuard iT`s recovery facility will enable Mutual & Federal to house its core facilities including database and communications links, at SafeGuard iT`s High Availability facilities in Randburg, which includes 200 of its personnel in addition to a link to its mainframe in Cape Town. The business continuity cover also includes four key branches of Mutual & Federal being able to move over to SafeGuard iT`s premises if necessary. Each staff member will be provided with the necessary equipment to continue working.
SafeGuard iT`s facilities provide a range of recovery options for call centres that start from syndicated backup services through to dedicated seats. The call centre will also double as an office recovery environment with high specification desktop PCs and LAN recovery environments. The facility is also campus fibre connected to the SafeGuard iT High Availability Bunker to ensure servers and data have maximum protection. Access to data from the call centre/office recovery environment takes place over high-speed (Gigabit) networks.
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