Thomas Cook takes data precautions

Travel company upgrades disaster recovery

Travel operator Thomas Cook has spent more than £1m upgrading data backup and disaster recovery systems to protect business operations.

IT applications used by 6,000 UK staff, such as the holiday inventory database, transactions, human resources and staff payroll systems, will be backed up to a remote disaster recovery site.

The project, run by Sun Microsystems, with SAP and Symantec, will safeguard data from 600 UK retail outlets and five core offices.

‘Our inventory system holds all our holiday packages and we have four million holidays available a year. To lose that and not be able to recover it would put us in a precarious position,’ said Adrian Berry, infrastructure manager at Thomas Cook UK.

The system will also provide better archiving to improve Thomas Cook’s response to regulatory compliance and industry governance demands.

The upgrade will take place in three stages. Sun enterprise backup systems will be installed by the end of this month. Symantec’s enterprise vaulting technology will then be put in place, before the travel operator conducts an SAP refresh by autumn.

The new system will also reduce IT storage and maintenance costs, says Berry. ‘The time to recover files will be greatly reduced and transparent,’ he said.

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