Scott County Helps Lawson Develop Cloud-based Disaster Recovery Service
Lawson Software has introduced Lawson Disaster Recovery, a cloud-based disaster recovery service designed to help customers achieve business continuity within hours of a technology-related disaster.
The offering is now generally available to Lawson S3 customers operating on a Microsoft Windows environment.
Lawson customer, Scott County, Minn., is the first organization to take advantage of Lawson Disaster Recovery via the Cloud. Since implementing the service, the county has improved recovery time from 48 hours to 12 hours. Lawson and Scott County worked closely together in the development of this product, implementing industry best practices for the way data is backed up and moved to the Lawson Disaster Recovery site. To help ensure readiness, Lawson fully tests recovery at the time of implementation and then conducts annual recovery tests using live production data.
"Our constituents, including county employees, need confidence that we can continue our business operations in the event of a disaster," said Kevin Ellsworth, chief financial officer for Scott County. "Our testing of Lawson Disaster Recovery has shown a significant reduction in the amount of time it can take us to restore many of our core business processes. We need to be able to make payroll, manage our financials and ensure that we have supplies needed to run efficiently. Extended downtime can cause considerable disruption in our services to residents of the county and our employees, which is not acceptable."
Ellsworth spoke about the county's pilot disaster recovery initiative with Lawson during the April 2010 Lawson Conference and User Exchange (CUE). Since that initial project, Lawson has now formalized the offering as a product for its S3 customers. "This product introduction underscores the fact that some of the best innovation in enterprise software comes from the collaboration we have with our customers," added Plath.
The service is delivered via Lawson Cloud Services, which provides flexible capacity, meaning customers can more readily increase or decrease their Cloud-based infrastructure usage as needed. The company pulls customer data on an hourly basis into Lawson Disaster Recovery and provides a two-hour restore point in the event of a disaster.
"Currently, many organizations risk being down for days and losing significant amounts of data in the event of a disaster, and that can be devastating to their business. Our customers have asked for a reliable, cost-effective business continuity solution when it comes to their most time-sensitive business processes," said Terry Plath, vice president of Lawson Cloud Services. "By taking advantage of the flexible capacity and rapid scalability of the Cloud, we can quickly restore the customers' instance of the software along with their production data to minimize downtime. This helps minimize the time it takes to get them back on track with their core business processes. Ultimately, this provides greater peace of mind when lost minutes and hours can make a tremendous impact on their business."