When Disaster Strikes
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Calamity is supposed to happen to the other guys. That’s what we tell ourselves anyway. If we didn’t, it would be difficult to get out of bed in the morning. But optimistically “hoping” for the best isn’t really a business continuity strategy either.
Though we put a lot of “language” around it, this is Endsight’s basic pitch to our clients when we advise them to invest in disaster recovery and business continuity countermeasures. Last year I blogged about business continuity planning in “The Value of Data: What is your data worth to your Organization?”
On December 19th, a fire broke out in our Berkeley office. The heating coil on the conference room’s water cooler over heated. This melted the cooler’s plastic base and ignited the conference room’s drywall. No one was hurt and the fire was contained in the conference room, but the collateral damage caused by the sprinkler system and smoke was significant.
Just like that, Endsight became the other guys.
“As an outsourced IT provider, part of our role is to assist our clients in disaster and business continuity planning,” said Mike Chaput, our CEO “A high percentages of businesses that close their doors because of a fire, flood or quake never recover. The computing infrastructure needs to be built and maintained in a way that will allow the enterprise to continue operating in spite of the disruption.”
That’s good advice. Oscar Wilde once said, “I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.” Fortunately, for Endsight our CTO, Josh Carroll and his team aren’t big fans of Mr. Wilde.
Just like we advise our clients, Endsight’s servers and business data are located off-site and were not impacted by the fire. Additionally, we had documented business continuity procedures to follow in the event something such as a fire occurred.
“It was huge effort for our team, we were fully operational by Monday morning.” said Chaput.
We let all of our clients know about the fire in an email, but otherwise it was Monday morning as usual. In fact, Donna Riser of All Performance, LLC sent us this response:
“So sorry to hear of this challenge right at the holidays. As a daily Endsight client, however, I can attest that you successfully pulled off uninterrupted service through it all. Congratulations on the success of your continuity plan and great team.”
We’re grateful to have such great clients, to Berkeley Fire Department and very proud of the way our team responded to the fire. I doubt anyone will say that they’re glad the fire happened, but we did get to conduct a real world test of our business continuity counter measures. Our process requires a review and analysis of the event and our response. The lessons we learn will be incorporated into future client recommendations. I don’t think the ops team will ask me my opinion, but if they did I think my recommendation would be, “BUY BOTTLED WATER!”
Business continuity planning is just one part of Endsight’s broader Outsourced IT service. If you’d like to compare your current approach, please don’t hesitate to reach out by clicking here.