BCP exercise 2012 completed successfully

Brussels, 14 January 2013 - To test its crisis management capabilities, EURid successfully ran an unannounced Business Continuity Plan (BCP) exercise on Wednesday, 12 December 2012.

Our exercise focused on switching the EPP, Registrar Extranet, Registrar DAS and Registrar WHOIS services from one data centre to another and back again. The impact on the registrar infrastructure was minimal - a temporary interruption of approximately 15 minutes - provided registrars had implemented the best practices we introduced in the 2011 BCP exercise.

The use of Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs) to the registrar services guaranteed a transparent failover while the switch was in progress.

Setup and execution

After simulating an issue in our main data centre, we failed over to the second data centre by means of a DNS update. After this change was propagated, the correct registrar services were accessible within 10 minutes, provided registrars were using FQDNs. If not, a manual update was required.

After two hours, we updated the FQDNs to once again point to the main data centre. Gradually systems failed back over to the main data centre once the FQDNs were picked up by the .eu registrars’ DNS servers.

The entire exercise was audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

For more information on the exercise and having a Business Continuity Plan good business practice, please see the upcoming issue of our .eu Identity magazine.