Picture, for a moment, enjoying the breathtaking sites in Rome, Italy – an ocean away from your usual home life and work routine. The last thing you are likely thinking about as you toss coins into the Trevi Fountain is: will my small business be okay in the event of a disaster?
Yet that is exactly what Ric Hayman, President of Provident Technology, had on his mind when news broke on July 3rd that a major water main break had occurred in downtown Philadelphia.
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Center-City-Water-Main-Break-487196401.html
There remains an approximately 10 feet deep hole at Samson and Juniper streets. The Philadelphia Water Department projects it could take months to fix the crater left behind.
Thanks to Provident Technology's business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan, operations continued without skipping a beat. Given that Provident provides key IT services to clients across the Philadelphia metropolitan area, the lawyers, doctors, and other small businesses did not realize that Provident’s office building was without electricity and water -- the building was shut down. Provident’s BCDR plan included routing calls to cell phones and providing employees the ability to work remotely. All critical systems were hosted off site. Ric says, “We made use of a BCDR plan that really worked well and the business was unaffected throughout this long ordeal.”
Provident Technology’s on site data was secured using premier DATTO BCDR solutions, which offers the ability to store data both locally and virtually. “DATTO makes restorations simple and incredibly easy. Restoring servers are a breeze, and it provides peace of mind knowing the system is backed up and running virtually in just a case like this,” says Ric.
Unfortunately, a lot of the other businesses in the Philadelphia Building were severely affected. The ramifications for businesses without a BCDR plan are lost employee hours and lost productivity which equals lost revenue. “People think that simply having backup is enough and it really isn’t,” Ric stresses. “If you backup your data once a day, what risk does that pose for your company? Are you willing to risk losing a day’s work, or 24 or more hours-worth of data? Even if your data is backed up in the Cloud, it could take technology experts a week to recover.” How much is your data really worth? Check out the Recovery Time Calculator (RTO).