Retailer can face any disaster with ServiceNow and Fusion3

Maximizing preparedness
Fusion3 Consulting (Fusion3) works closely with hundreds of businesses to scale, optimize, and safeguard existing ServiceNow deployments. The company’s collaborative approach enables its ServiceNow customers to efficiently map, analyze, and improve processes. The real-world benefits of Fusion3’s hands on expertise was recently highlighted by a flawless implementation of Business Continuity Management at a leading regional U.S. retailer.

“Millions of people depend on this customer for food, medicine, and other basic items they need every day, so the company is committed to keep operating in any situation,” says Kevin Frost, Co-Founder, Fusion3. “Unfortunately, the organization didn’t have strong systems in place to get its business running again in the event of a disaster.” 

Although the company had basic disaster recovery plans, there was no unified strategy for updating documents and spreadsheets across the organization, including in stores. Business impact analyses were also challenging due to lack of insight across systems. As a result, disaster recovery testing of critical applications and services took days instead of hours.

“Before Business Continuity Management, there were a lot of paper spreadsheets and digital documents, but nothing was organized on a centralized system,” recalls Frost. “To make matters worse, the retailer lacked automated processes for disaster recovery and individually tested over 500 apps.”

After successfully implementing IT Service Management to streamline help desk services and consolidate applications on a single, scalable cloud-based platform, the organization expanded its ServiceNow footprint with the platform’s Configuration Management Database (CMDB). By improving asset management, the retailer now has full visibility across data centers, apps, and endpoints companywide. This makes it easier to review digital and physical assets so IT teams can monitor all operations and quickly address performance and security issues. 

“ServiceNow eliminates data silos and is a game changer that enables us to keep serving customers,” explains Frost. “For the first time, the retailer can reliably analyze data from hundreds of stores to better understand impact and risk in the event of a disaster or service interruption. Perhaps most importantly, ServiceNow opened the door to update our customer’s legacy disaster recovery plans and keep operations running with Business Continuity Management.”

Automating disaster recovery
Before adopting the new strategy, the retailer struggled to understand the complex interdependencies linking different apps, systems, and data centers. These challenges made prioritizing critical functions—and determining recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO)—almost impossible. 

“Without a viable business continuity management solution, the real-world impact of a disaster could devastate the company,” says Frost. “For example, fresh food spoils quickly if power is knocked out by a flood, fire, or earthquake. With solid systems in place, perishable items can be swiftly moved to other locations and distributed to feed hungry survivors—but only if there are emergency plans in place that are supported by well-thought-out protocols and technology.” 

Fortunately, the retailer was only a couple of steps away from simplifying business impact analyses, automating disaster recovery testing, and formulating a comprehensive business continuity management plan with Business Continuity Management. To ensure a flawless implementation of the ServiceNow solution, Frost knew Fusion3 had to work closely with the company to map and audit all internal functions and processes.

“Conducting an audit was an important first step for the customer,” says Frost. “It helped stakeholders reexamine priorities, discover where they were, and understand where they needed to go in terms of disaster recovery.” 

Since implementing Business Continuity Management with the assistance of Fusion3, the retailer has significantly reduced potential crisis impact by tracking key dependencies, prioritizing critical functions, and automating recovery testing. 

“Continuously updating disaster recovery plans with real-time data enables the retailer to more quickly restore crucial apps for point-of-sale systems, warehouse operations, and supply chain management,” says Frost. “With ServiceNow, even hurricanes, fires, floods, and earthquakes won’t prevent this retailer from quickly getting critical services back up and running at over 500 stores.”

Recovering Faster
Selecting Business Continuity Management to optimize disaster recovery was an easy choice for the retailer because it already relied on CMDB to map, query, and understand complex relationships between systems. Nevertheless, Fusion3 presented in-depth technical demos prior to implementation that clearly showcased how Business Continuity Management seamlessly integrates to share and analyze actionable data. 

“When it comes to responding to a disaster, you have to be as close to your CMDB as possible to gain visibility into all apps and systems,” states Frost. “ServiceNow enables our customer to pull data directly into Business Continuity Management to visualize how processes work together, understand dependencies, and better prioritize disaster recovery plans.”

Since deploying a disaster recovery strategy with Business Continuity Management and in partnership with Fusion3, the retailer has accelerated business impact analyses time to completion (TTC), increased system and app disaster testing efficiency, and extended high-availability disaster recovery coverage to 100% of critical IT assets. The company also significantly improved overall mean time to recovery (MTTR) during disaster recovery simulations and drills with detailed recovery plans, secondary site definitions, and predefined runbooks. 

Serving customers in any situation 
With ServiceNow, Fusion3 enables the leading regional U.S. retailer to plan for service disruptions and quickly recover from a range of natural disasters. The company is now well-prepared to reroute critical supplies such as food and medicine, rapidly restore point of sale systems, and leverage backup data centers to keep essential systems and apps online.

“ServiceNow offered a solid foundation for the company to adopt Business Continuity Management and successfully prepare for any disaster,” concludes Frost. “We continue to work closely with the retailer to further reduce risks by looking at deploying more ServiceNow solutions including Operational Resilience Management, Security Incidence Response, and Vulnerability Response.” 

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