Hurricanes impact everyone from Houston to Miami to Manhattan—especially people running IT operations often times without a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution.
The push for digital transformation presses this point home during hurricane season which starts in June and runs through November. Organizations depend on constant access to data, networks, sensors, and servers like never before.
There’s plenty to worry about in Hurricane Alley and population-dense areas of the Eastern Seaboard. High winds knock out power lines in the storm’s path. Heavy rains flood cities and towns hundreds of miles inland for days after a hurricane makes landfall. Evacuations clog highways and separate people from their homes, offices, and workplaces.
The hazards became all too evident in 2017. Hurricane Harvey hovered off the coast of Houston in late August, delivering pounding rains that swamped vast swaths of the city and inflicted $125 billion in damages, the worst since Hurricane Katrina. In the days and weeks to come, Hurricane Irma menaced South Florida and Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico.
Moreover, few IT professionals can forget the impact of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when high winds and flooding punished organizations that lost their data centers and their backups. If your organization requires always-on IT access, you can’t afford to ignore even remote risks of hurricane-related outages.
One way to mitigate hurricane hazards is to partner with experts in DRaaS, which has four core advantages:
At CBTS, we have extensive experience with data centers, replication technologies, and system design. Our DRaaS experts have set up these kinds of systems for a broad range of industries and marketplace requirements. Our expertise arrived just in time for a South Florida company in 2017.
CBTS helped an accounting firm keep its operations online during Hurricane Irma in 2017. Wittock CPA was working with a large volume of data related damage claims from the 2010 Blackwater Horizon oil spill. The company required a 15-fold jump in staff to handle the claims and could not afford the prospect of days or weeks of downtime from a hurricane.
CBTS implemented a cloud-hosted environment with high-availability data centers hosted in the Midwest, far from the hazards of storm-related downtime. When Hurricane Irma made landfall, employees had access to their data, and all critical systems remained online. CBTS support staff helped resolve employees’ questions as they came up.
“I’ve had a long career in the IT industry and know what it takes to protect a rapidly growing firm like Wittock CPA from simple incidents to much larger threats like a hurricane. Irma would put any organization to the test, but because we took the preemptive steps to implement business continuity and cloud hosting with CBTS, it was business as usual from an IT perspective.”
– Craig Turner, Director of IT and Continuity, Wittock CPA
To find out more about how CBTS helped this company dodge a disaster, download our free case study.