Creating Peaceful Sleep for IT Leaders

The Far Hills, N.J.-based United States Golf Association protects between 600 gigabytes and 700 gigabytes of mission-critical data every day via cloud computing, using IBM's business continuity and resilience services. This includes more than 4 million membership records and more than 150,000 daily e-mails.

In September 2008, USGA selected a cloud-based business resilience service from IBM, called Business Continuity and Resiliency Services. "With new regulations like compliance and increasing security and data demands on our network, we have made it a priority to protect our data and ensure that we have the right disaster recovery plan in place," says Carroll. "In working with IBM on this multi-year project and tapping their business resilience and cloud expertise, we have put into place a flexible infrastructure recovery solution that ensures the availability and resiliency of our core business functions."

Carroll elaborates on the reason for the general lack of excitement for BCRS outside of her own department. "I work for a non-profit sports industry, so the focus is golf, not innovation," she says. "I'm in the basement and excited about backup and recovery, nevertheless this isn't as a matter of fact appealing to golf executives. For all that, just like any other business, our data needs to be protected, so I realized that I needed to 'lead the charge' on the importance of this."

To date, USGA hasn't had any incidents that would cause the research to prove its worth. But, an important benefit for Carroll is that she can sleep better at night, knowing that USGA's critical data is backed up. When she talks with IT executives in other organizations, she emphasizes that they need to look at something like this, too. "I tell them to think of it as insurance," she points out. "You have insurance for your building. Why wouldn't you want to have some form of insurance for your data, which is a more important asset than your building?"

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