As the East Coast braces for Hurricane Irene, here is a checklist from ITworld on what to do before and during a hurricane to protect your organization’s technology assets. (For customers/partners on the Eastern Seaboard, as you make final preparations for the hurricane, please ensure your business is protected by verifying your EVault backups. Our support team is on call ready to assist with any failed backup messages found in your logs. Please contact EVault Customer Support via phone, 1.866-855-9555, or email Support@evault.com should you need help with your backups.)
On the same topic, CIO Magazine just published this article about how our customer, The Situs Companies in Houston, Texas, hurricane-proofed their systems and data by implementing EVault Cloud-Connected storage services, after they narrowly escaped the full wrath of Hurricane Ike in 2008. Hurricane Ike ravaged the U.S. Gulf region and caused some $37.6 billion in damages. Among those affected was the real estate advisory firm, which lost all of its power in the disaster and nearly lost its local data center.
Luckily, it didn’t but the close call made Situs’ director of global information technology Bill McCown reconsider its approach to data protection and recovery.
“We realized that if the data center had actually gone offline, we had everything backed up to tape. The data was stored and secure but there was no way to recall our backup tapes, and there would be no way for us to get at any of that information, or get it out to another location if the power was down.”
Situs turned to EVault storage services for a hybrid Cloud-connected approach to data backup and disaster recovery in 2010, replacing its old legacy tape-based data protection for its nearly 100 servers. And since making the move, the company has dramatically improved the speed and reliability of backups and significantly reduced IT costs. Said McCown:
“Overall, this single monthly cost was very similar to what we had been paying tape-wise. But we got the additional benefits of not having to acquire a secondary data center for our DR [disaster recovery] purposes and have someone manage that for us.“
The CIO article concluded with
“Situs, in short, is getting much more value for a similar cost. For the most part, the company’s move to the cloud has been seamless. While McCown hopes never to witness another disaster like Hurricane Ike, he is confident that if it does happen, Situs and its IT operations can weather the storm.”
Is your business’ systems and data disaster-proof?
