The
Newsletter of the Pan American Health Organization - July
2008IT Upgrades Foster PAHO Business Continuity
(From left) PAHO's chief of telecommunications and computer operations, Pat Moisa; systems engineer Norman Spirt; IT security chief Timothy Brown; and telecommunications assistants Harry Morris and Ricky Harpster. Photo © Sonia Mey-Schmidt/PAHO
Recent improvements in the Pan American Health Organization's (PAHO) information systems will mean better protection against interruptions of information technology (IT) service and should save the organization some $1.25 million over the next two years.
The improvements include consolidation of 75 servers formerly used at headquarters onto four new larger machines and acquisition of additional server and storage capacity from the United Nations International Computing Center (UNICC) in Geneva. The changes allow PAHO to switch over to the UNICC's remote server and storage capacity in case of failures in PAHO's own data center.
With this move, PAHO has outsourced the management of physical servers and storage capacity but retained management of storage allocations, operating systems, and applications. The changes will mean major savings over the alternative of buying additional servers, and they help guard against failures due to fire or other major threats to PAHO's IT infrastructure.
The changes build on improvements instituted four years ago, when PAHO outsourced its mainframe computer to the UNICC. That move improved performance, capacity, and fault tolerance (the ability to withstand system failures) and provided protection for key applications used in PAHO's finance, procurement, payroll, budget, and health insurance operations. It is saving the organization an estimated $400,000 annually.
The more recent changes are providing similar levels of business-continuity protection to server-based applications including email, the Internet and PAHO Intranet, program planning and country support (AMPES/OMIS), human resources administration, machine translation, SharePoint, and workflow processes, among others. The changes have further improved fault tolerance and protection of users' data while reducing recovery time and the time needed to respond to requests for new capacity.
"We have solid IT protection now for the administrative support that underpins all of PAHO's technical cooperation work, in line with current industry approaches for business continuity," said Lorne Murdoch, area manager for Information Technology Services.