Toos was retained as consultants by Chubb, a fire safety and security solution company to help create a redunduncy plan for one of their clients. The client uses an ACMS (Access Control Management System) to control the identification and traffic of employees, guests and contractors. The client required a long-term solution for protecting critical data and uninterupted access control management.

Chubb and Toos believed the best way to mitigate the risks is to create a failover cluster. A failover cluster is a set of computer servers that work together to provide high availability. If the primary server goes down, the backup server in the cluster can assume its workload with either minimum or no downtime through a process referred to as failover.

ACMS High Availability (HA) solution consists of two servers that are redundant and backing up to each other. Domain authentication redundancy was achieved using primary and secondary servers where access HA was configured using NEC ExpressCluster solutions. In order to achieve this, we created the environment.

Data is mirrored between the two servers by interconnecting the servers through a private network as well as a standard public network.

After implementing the plan, Chubb and Toos configured and programmed the primary and backup servers. Validation was completed to ensure both servers were connected, and the disks were mirrored. Manual failover tests were done to ensure that if the primary server goes down, the backup server assumes responsibility and acts as the primary server.

• Productivity and profitability has increased thanks to an effective document organisation strategy that is driven by SharePoint Online.
• SharePoint Online is now the single centralised document management repository that provides all the functionality the company requires for efficient client and case records management.
• Client data management has been streamlined through the introduction of SharePoint Online increasing business case efficiency and improving productivity, customer service and client relations.
• All electronic email correspondence is now saved in SharePoint alongside the respective case files and customer information.
• The staff are now collaborating more effectively on cases and sharing knowledge from the same repository.
• The introduction of FAST search capability has made it quick and easy for their staff to find up to date information.
• As an added layer of security, document version tracking is active and access permissions have been applied at both user and group level, ensuring that all staff only have access to their respective client case details.
• Any duplicate data has been completely erased from the client’s network, speeding up productivity and reducing the workload placed on their internal file server and exchange servers.