Pacific Transcription – Risk assessment

Pacific Transcription is a business on the fast track. But a decade of strong organic growth meant numerous IT system expansions which may have exposed the business to risk.

Transcription Service gets “State of the Nation” Review

The Challenge

Pacific Transcription is a business on the fast track.  Founded in 2002, the company specialises in transcription, stenography and typing services across a number of sectors including legal, medical, research, finance and media. The company is at the forefront of digital transcription technology and has grown far beyond its humble origins to now have a global footprint. Such growth has meant that IT systems were continuously expanded to accommodate the increasing technology demands.

CEO Steve Rutledge believed the system development strategy at each stage of growth was strong, however the business had reached the stage where an end-to-end review of infrastructure and architecture was due.  He wanted to understand the impact and contributions to the business of all existing infrastructure, and he realised that a state of the nation review was required, in order to make the business more resilient and robust.

andersenIT was asked to complete a full risk assessment.

The Solution

andersenIT specialists reviewed the current state of Pacific Transcription’s  IT infrastructure, completing a documented audit of the current environment so Pacific Transcriptions had a “point in time” reference for their infrastructure.

andersenIT then met with Pacific Transcription to understand the business objectives in terms of availability and recoverability of systems.

From this a full risk assessment was completed which determined the gap analysis between current state and desired state.

Recommendations were developed, which were prioritised and aligned to business objectives. Finally, a Disaster Recovery plan was developed so that in the event of any system failure, Pacific Transcription would have documented processes which would get system back online quickly, minimise downtime and allow workflow to proceed while systems were unable to be accessed.

The Result

andersenIT were able to identify a 9 broad risk areas, with 8 of these categorised as likely to occur.  In addition:

• 6 had consequences that were rated severe or high, meaning the impact to business operation would be unacceptable, with key areas of operations affected.
• 5 had a risk rating of severe or high, meaning corrective action was required to address the risk immediately or within 1 month.

Recommendations included a change to network topology, software updates, hardware upgrades, back up improvements and server migration options, all of which are being implemented.

“As the business expanded, our clients became less tolerant of any delays.  We needed robust systems, backups, and business continuity.  The andersenIT review, risk assessment, disaster recovery and business continuity plans gave us the clarity of perspective we needed.”