Rabobank New Zealand assures business continuity with Plan B
Key Outcomes
- Access to alternate office space, including a mixture of dedicated and multi-subscriber seating
- Flexible across branch network
- Assurance critical services can be maintained
Situation
Rabobank New Zealand is a division of Rabobank, a leader in food and agribusiness banking.
Its national head office is situated in Wellington's central business district and supports a branch network across New Zealand.
The Business Challenges
Rabobank needs to safeguard the interests of customers, staff and the organisation from the effects of major environmental events and other potential threats that cause business disruptions. This meant having an alternate workplace site with a specialist business continuity provider was essential.
Key objectives for the organisation were to ensure that:
- The business could continue to provide services to customers and branches during an unplanned event with minimal delay.
- Staff were ready and familiar with an alternate workplace to assure they could implement the Business Continuity Plan (BCP) as expected.
- The business complied with local, global and regulatory obligations with regard to business continuity.
Plan B's standby offices provide us with nation-wide flexible capabilities to continue our service delivery to our customers and branches in the event of disruption.
Karen Mansfield,
Business Continuity Manager AU & NZ for Rabobank
The Business Implications
As a company providing banking services, downtime for Rabobank could result in significant financial impact, damage to reputation and possible regulatory action.
Rabobank further protects its customers by ensuring staff are well- trained and tested in the operation of its Business Continuity Plan so they will react appropriately to a disruption.
The Solution & Business Benefits
Plan B worked with Rabobank to create a customised solution to meet its business continuity requirements.
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1. Standby Offices
Standby Offices ensure people will have a place to work if their normal office is inaccessible for any reason. Plan B's recovery facilities are permanently set up with desks, phones, computers, networking and everything you’d expect in a normal office.
This service for Rabobank gives 24/7 access to a combination of exclusively reserved and multi-subscriber premises and equipment in a crisis when staff can’t use their normal place of work.
The service provides a completely managed facility which includes fully equipped offices in a permanent state of readiness. This allows Rabobank to continue to do business and service its customers and branches without unnecessary delay.
This facility helps to reduce financial and regulatory risk and provide peace of mind to the business’ risk owners.
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2. Equipment Colocation
Equipment Colocation allows customer server equipment to be located within one of Plan B’s secure data centre environments for access during a business continuity event. These can be in hot, warm or cold standby depending on the level of connectivity and maintenance required.
Rabobank have critical business continuity equipment hosted with Plan B that can be made available if its primary IT infrastructure becomes unavailable for any reason.
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3. Planned Activations
Planned Activations are a physical test of a customer's business continuity plan, facilitated by Plan B. This service assists Rabobank to test its preparedness for a business continuity event.
The business enacts an agreed scenario to test how people are likely to react and see how they apply the BCP. Offering the ability to test provides the business with confidence that in a real outage the BCP would work as expected.
With these facilities, our staff have proven they are confident to maintain critical activities when required.
Karen Mansfield,
Business Continuity Manager AU & NZ for Rabobank