Winslow Capital Advances IT Maturity Model with DRaaS
A smart approach to business continuity.
Winslow Capital Management, LLC (“Winslow Capital”) has been investing in transformational growth companies since 1992. Through repeatable, time-tested processes firmly rooted in fundamental research, their goal is to achieve successful client outcomes over the long-term while carefully managing risk. Atomic Data supports that vision by providing Atomic Cloud® private hosted servers, workstation support & management, security & compliance consultation, firewall colocation, and disaster recovery implementation so they can meet their clients’ needs.
Winslow Capital manages growth equity strategies for their clients and as such, seamless business continuity is non-negotiable. To further advance their IT maturity model, Winslow Capital’s Managing Director of Information Technology, Joshua Fuller, recently partnered with Atomic Data to execute a complete system role swap disaster recovery exercise.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) plays an essential role in keeping businesses up-and-running. With natural disasters, ransomware, and social engineering attacks increasing at an unprecedented pace, not having an effective business continuity plan is not an option. For Winslow Capital, the ability to quickly failover data and operations from its production data center to a secure and geographically isolated data center is essential.
Effective DRaaS cuts operational downtime (or Recovery Time Objective [RTO]) from hours, days, and weeks into minutes and significantly decreases the risk of data loss (or Recovery Point Objective [RPO]). Testing and validating a disaster recovery plan is also an essential part of business continuity, ensuring that staff, vendors, and leadership know exactly what steps to take during an actual event.
Tested, reliable disaster recovery.
In preparation for this disaster recovery exercise, Atomic Data project managers and engineers met with Winslow Capital’s IT leadership to determine key deliverables, checkpoints, meeting markers, and acceptable RTOs and RPOs. The nature of Winslow Capital’s work requires a DR solution with low impact so they can return to operations as quickly as possible. Atomic Data engineers prepared a disaster recovery playbook to provide the network & systems architecture, documentation, and checklists needed to ensure successful disaster recovery outcomes.
As the exercise commenced, Atomic Data engineers were able to failover to a backup data center within the specified objective. Regarding the testing performed, Joshua Fuller, Managing Director of Information Technology at Winslow Capital said, “Winslow team members are expected to put the interest of our clients at the front of everything we do, and your Atomic team showed their alignment with that philosophy. We challenge our teams and colleagues to rise up, shine, and empower each other; without exception, your team rose to that challenge.”
“We challenge our teams and colleagues to rise up, shine, and empower each other; without exception, your team rose to that challenge.”
-Joshua Fuller, Managing Director of Information Technology at Winslow Capital
But sometimes, not everything goes as planned when disasters hit. That’s why performing these tests in advance are critical to ensure true business continuity. During the exercise, Atomic Data engineers encountered a hurdle, requiring them to collaborate with the vendor to achieve a successful data migration from the data centers. Atomic Data engineers worked in stride with Winslow Capital to communicate with the vendor and ensure return to service programs were defined in accordance with business requirements.
“This could have been a major obstacle, but thanks to your talented staff, it was an exercise of our Incident Response Plan that resulted in no service function or data loss,” Joshua said. Winslow Capital has peace of mind knowing that if a disaster hits, Atomic Data will be ready to respond.
Atomic Data staff can help you develop and test your disaster recovery plan so you have the protection your business needs should disaster strike. Additional professional services are available for business continuity planning, DR onboarding, configuration assistance and more.
Contact us to start a conversation regarding your IT maturity model!
Wanting to see how Atomic Data helps other businesses? Keep reading!