OMV Taps Escape Business Technologies as IT Consultants

Aberdeen-based Escape Business Technologies, the energy-focused provider of IT consultancy, has completed a business continuity project with Central Europe's largest oil and gas corporation, OMV.

Escape was appointed by the London-based UK subsidiary of OMV to provide consultancy on its internal resilience strategy and has implemented a full business continuity and disaster recovery plan for OMV UK's data. After a full risk analysis carried out by Escape, data was replicated through virtualization technology so that in the event of a disaster, the firm will be operational again within 3 hours.

OMV is one of 7 UK oil operators that Escape supports throughout the lifecycle of the well. For OMV, it was essential that if there were any communication issues within their UK operations, their systems could become operational again very quickly.

Sarah Watt, corporate services manager, Escape, said, "We are delighted to have carried out this resilience and recovery project for OMV. By removing dependence away from the hardware within their London office, OMV has peace of mind that a disaster recovery system is in place and operationally, the firm will not be affected by any network failures in the future. With this project, we have been able to use our consultancy expertise by providing strategic advice, as well as utilising our virtualisation technology in Aberdeen."

Escape has been operating for 10 years and has developed new products, through their partners FalconStor Inc, specifically for the oil and gas sector. FalconStor is the world leader in disk-based data protection and with Escape, provides innovative solutions in storage virtualization, continuous data protection (CDP) and disaster recovery (DR).

Katherine Walker, UK country services manager - IT, OMV, said, "We needed to ensure that our operations would not be affected by damage or destruction to our office. This became even more critical during recent exploration drilling offshore UK. The team at Escape provided a bespoke resiliency/disaster recovery solution for us, utilising our existing Vmware environment. Their expertise has been invaluable in the implementation of an extremely complex project."