IT serves company’s disaster and business recovery plans

Off-site backup caters for outages and accidents
Clive Emdon
ONE OF the country’s top 10 freight forwarding and logistics companies has a disaster recovery plan in place that relies largely on IT solutions. ZA Trans Logistics operations director Paul Lawrence says: “Our business is about timeous information and handling in excess of 4 000 shipments a month. So if our IT goes down for whatever reason – be it an accident or an outage anywhere in the country – we have off-site backup.” He says business continuity plans in each office are contingent on the ‘disaster plan’. “We must get our business up and running in as short a time as possible. “Our wide-area network serves our offices and clients. We have key staff in place to recover all in-company logistics.” The company has tested the system successfully, says Lawrence. He describes the internal Zat Online IT system that the company has developed over a 2-year period as “a proactive management tool with service-level parameters that provides us with a central dynamic source of information.” It provides online customs information and enables the management of import and export shipments without having to use files. “At the moment our plans to introduce new indenting and monitoring are in development as is the security of the system and its firewalls,” Lawrence says. “We are investing in the electronic future. Our system is in continuous development with a number of projects on the go. “It can interface with clients’ systems and pushes information into them. In future developments they will also be able to access documents such as invoices from our web site.”