Partners Lead Disaster Recovery Post Hurricanes Harvey, Irma
James Anderson
As Hurricane Irma hurtles out of Florida and into the remainder of the Southeast as a tropical depression, people across the state are beginning to take full inventory of the storm’s damage, and businesses are no exception.
Companies face not only danger to their physical property, but the possibility of losing valuable data if they have not prepared adequately. That’s where disaster recovery comes into play.
The response to Hurricane Harvey offers an example of the painstaking process of data protection and recovery that survivors of Irma and future natural disasters can apply.
Four data center and cloud providers shared with us how they and their partners played a role in Harvey’s clean-up.
Preparation
These disaster-recovery companies had a plan in place before Harvey slammed into Texas at 130 miles per hour.
Green Cloud’s Keith Coker
Keith Coker, chief operating officer of Green Cloud Technologies, says that although not many of his customers declared a disaster, his company prepped for the storm with the assumption that any of them might.
“That’s a pretty heavy workload that we take on as a company to make sure that we have the resources, the staffing — that we’ve done everything that we can ahead of the event to be ready for our customers that need that service,” he told Channel Partners.
But the importance of being prepared applies not just to the disaster-recovery provider, but to its customers and their partners. Coker lists multiple levels of preparedness that he saw from customers that dealt with Harvey. The most proactive of businesses had already moved their production schedules to a secondary location. Others called in several days prior to the storm to ensure that there was compatibility with Green Cloud solutions. But some others instead reacted, declaring a disaster after the fact, and asking Green Cloud for help.
Another circumstance involved an end user that did not use Green Cloud solutions but worked with a mutual partner. This business facility sat behind a dam that would soon be released.
Datto’s Matt Richards
“They actually knew ahead of time that their facility was going to be flooded, and we were able to step in, and in a very short order – in a matter of hours – create them an environment with which they could keep running and have a place to store their data and remain active before they actually got flooded,” Coker said.
Matt Richards, Datto‘s vice president of product marketing, says the most successful partners were the ones that virtualized their customers’ environments prior to the disaster. This supports the old saying that “fortune favors the prepared.”
“It’s a terrible thing to say …
