Successful Security Test

Zalaris' IT-systems were back at full power only 32 minutes after the company had constructed a crisis scenario. ”We sleep well at night”, says CEO Hans-Petter Mellerud.

Zalaris delivers payroll and other HR services to more than 150.000 employees every month on behalf of companies in the Nordic region, the Baltics and Poland. As part of this Zalaris also stores important information on behalf of the clients.

The IT infrastructure is based among others on SAP HANA servers from Dell. These are located at two data centres at two separate locations in the eastern part of Norway. This is for security reasons, in case one of the locations would be hit by a power outage or other more serious incidents.

Zalaris recently carried out a security test at the two data centres in cooperation with Basis Consulting that is hosting the actual machinery. The company is also an SAP specialist.

“We regularly perform security tests. This time we particularly wanted to test that the machines support and complement each other in a satisfactory way. This is extremely important since we are storing information for our clients. During the test we simply cut the power in one of the data centres”, Hans-Petter Mellerud explains.

The test was successful. Within merely 32 minutes Zalaris could log on to their SAP HANA systems through the other data centre. The systems were then up and running and could be used as normal by the clients. One specific travel expense account that was saved five seconds before the forced black-out was still there and it had been registered as if nothing had happened.

“The results are encouraging, and they were even better than we had expected. Our goal is to be back online within one hour after such incidents. This time we did it in almost half of the expected time. Just as important is the fact that no information was lost. This is crucial both for the clients and for us at Zalaris, and we have made big investments to avoid this. At the same time it is reassuring to see that our security systems are working well in practice”, says CTO Halvor Leirvåg.

Hans-Petter Mellerud adds: “Even if a disaster should occur our clients can be confident that the information they have stored in our systems is kept safely. We sleep well at night”.