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Backup Kept Company Going

Today, Mar/Apr 2006 by Wickenheiser, Matt

A Lewiston, Maine firm's preparations to protect critical data worked when disaster struck.

Rob Champagne saw flames and smoke pouring out of a window in the building where he worked and had one thought: "That's not good."

Champagne, the systems engineer for FISC Solutions, knew that one window well. It was the one right next to FISC's computer server area, the digital heart of the company. The January 6, 2006 mid-afternoon fire wiped out FISC's 38 servers and associated hardware; roughly 20% of the equipment remained usable after being baked by flames and drowned by firefighters.

It was very "not good."

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The economic consequences could have been far reaching. FISC provides back office services for a number of Maine and New Hampshire banks and businesses, processing up to $3 million in checks on peak days. The fire was mostly contained to FISC's servers, but if it knocked the company offline, businesses ranging from home-heating-oil firms to banks would be affected.

Instead, FISC's digital disaster-preparedness precautions worked. The company was processing checks that evening, two hours later, running off a cobbled-together server system.

To FISC's credit, the company had a comprehensive and well-run data backup program, and when disaster did come, it was able to pull out the replicated information and keep going, said Wayne C. Krauth, vice president at Workgroup Technology Partners in Westbrook, Maine, which provides disaster-preparedness consulting to companies, as well as disaster recovery work.

Today, every business depends to some extent on computerized data. How well companies prepare for digital disasters, ranging from simple server crashes to fires, floods or other calamities, translates directly into whether they'll be able to continue as going concerns. Business continuity through disasters became a hot topic after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and the recent Gulf Coast hurricanes have reinforced the need.

"Most organizations live and breathe on information," said Krauth. "When it's gone, they're gasping for air - gasping for data." "You lose your data and your business stops."

Krauth and others from Workgroup worked with Champagne and FISC's other information technology experts to recover from the fire. Because of the financial nature of the company, FISC is regulated by the federal government and had to have a certain level of preparedness built into its plans.

The same goes for generally large, publicly traded companies, said Krauth. They must have robust disaster-preparedness plans in place to protect shareholders' investment.

One- or two-person micro enterprises may have all their information on a laptop that follows the business people around, from office to home. But businesses in the middle - small, but not tiny - particularly need to take a close look at how they're set up to survive digital disaster. "If someone has a disaster, it can cost their business, if they don't plan things right," said Krauth.

One common and potentially dire mistake Krauth sees businesses make is that while they back up their data, they keep the backup tapes in the same building as the original servers. If something happens to the facility, all the data's gone - backup and original.

Some larger companies have their data backup systems placed in remote geographic locations, said Krauth. And that can be a good safeguard against natural disasters.

When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, companies that had both their main and backup hardware in the same town may have been in trouble. If they had backups on the West Coast, they'd be OK. Keeping the data in another region also puts the hardware on another power grid, which could also be an advantage, Krauth noted.

Workgroup, said Krauth, is an alternative data site for a San Francisco company. The company's data is continuously backed up to servers in Workgroup's Westbrook offices.

FISC had a live-update system before the fire. The duplicate system was backed up every 15 minutes with data from the company. But after the fire, FISC had to recreate the 15 minutes of data that hadn't been backed up.

With 100 people working all the time, that 15 minutes represented a lot of information, said Champagne. That's a lesson learned, he said, and today the company is continuously backing up its data to its alternate location.

Carol T. Sabasteanski, president and chief executive officer of FISC, said everyone in her company had a clear understanding of their roles in an emergency. They also knew what the priorities were as far as getting the computer systems back up. That gave the IT experts the space and direction they needed to work, she said.

"You never know what the disaster is going to be, how it's going to affect you," she said "If everyone knows their roles, you're halfway there."

Within two weeks, the company was back to normal, she said. And the real mark that the company handled the disaster well came from customer surveys, she said, in which 77% of FISC's clients gave them a perfect 10 for service through the crisis.

Backup Kept Company Going

Today, Mar/Apr 2006 by Wickenheiser, Matt

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