Home working plan reduces disaster risk for Apacs

Apacs, the UK's payments association, has signed a contract with outsourced services company Attenda to bolster its disaster recovery plans.

The organisation, which acts as the voice for the banking industry, is ensuring staff can work from home to access emails and data in the event of a catastrophe.

Sue Yoe, director of technology and facilities for Apacs, told silicon.com: "The central administration at Apacs did not have as much disaster recovery in place [as the payments processing section].

"We looked at the way people work and realised we didn't need disaster recovery in a conventional sense. Most people have PCs at home - what we needed was the ability to work remotely.

"We put that in place in the headquarters in Finsbury Square then we looked for someone who could host a replica of what we do there."

Attenda won the contract for an undisclosed amount to ensure Apacs administration staff could be up and running by the next day with up-to-date data should a disaster take place.

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Yoe added: "If something goes down we get our back-up tape delivered to Attenda and they restore the data to users. All our users are working from home. They all use security tokens, user IDs and passwords to log in.

"A couple of our services are available from web-based applications. We can get at our email but if we want to get at files we use the security tokens as a secure means to get in."

Fifty Apacs staff are now involved in disaster rehearsal to test the new systems.

Yoe said plans to improve disaster recovery were already underway in May 2005 but the 7/7 bombings in London last year reinforced her view of their necessity.

She said: "It was already in the pipeline - I met several suppliers in May but 7/7 put a bit more focus and impetus behind it."

The Apacs project took six months to ensure staff could work at home and run applications and databases.