The three institutions will analyse and improve their Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) plans and share common computer hardware systems to enable collaboration. The bid will support the BC and DR requirements of the other reconfiguration bids in particular, Blackboard, Careers, Student Records, Alumni and Intranet.

As part of the proposal the three institutions will develop collaborative Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans and liaise and assist one another as circumstances demand. The institutions will investigate options to interconnect their respective computer rooms either via the Wales public sector network or with direct fibre connectivity.

Systems and services will be developed and tested at SU by linking two existing computer rooms. Following successful implementation at SU the system will be expanded to enable SU and SMU to collaborate and copy critical data between each others sites. This will ensure that should a computer room or campus be rendered out of service, any mission critical services could be rebuilt from the backup media onto readily available and tested hardware.

Networking, systems and applications support staff, at each institution, will work closely together to develop a coherent Business Continuity policy.  This will include staff relocation at the partner institution to support services should the home institution become inoperable.

The proposal will enable all technical staff to cooperate and liaise as a larger virtual technical support team which crosses many conventional management domains. It will enable the teams to test and share new technologies and new ways of managing data storage and backup/restore services.