The great thing about living and working in Texas, is the only disasters tend to be on the coastlines or in remote towns. The coast encounter hurricanes and small towns deal with tornadoes. The rest of Texas, we don’t have to worry, or so we thought.
The power suppliers believed it to be true, the cities believed it to be true and most of us believed it to be true. We all went about our daily life not thinking about planning for a disaster and rested comfortably in our ignorance. We found out recently that this is, of course, not true and unfortunately many people paid the price.
As a Data Center owner, Thin-nology plans and tests, daily, weekly, and monthly, to be prepared for the day a disaster strikes. For all our planning and testing, from the small to the large Data Centers, all were affected in some way. As expected, Data Centers are also dependent on suppliers. Internet, fuel for the generators, water for employees, all are things that are beyond our control. Or are they?
Internet, for example, there are mobile satellite trucks that could be utilized. For fuel, additional storage tanks could have been installed and for water, again a storage tank could have left many better prepared.
As we look at what we could have done better, what could the average business have done better? We have to look at our options. We have all heard the saying 20/20 hindsight. Well now is the perfect time to put that into play. It is not “will” we get hit by another disaster, it is “when” will we be hit?
Many companies have defaulted to 20/20 hindsight following last week’s events. The strange thing is that implementation of Remote Workplace Solutions and Colocation are not only good in the case of disasters, but they’re also great technology and utilization of funds for business operations every day.
So a disaster is not always a bad thing. It teaches us to look at the ways we can plan better. Look at the ways to ride out a disaster with the minimum of impact on our business and of course our families. Now we are not advocating spending large amounts of money. Sometimes it makes more sense to prepare to shut down and ride it out. But a lot of time it can cause us to look at different ways to address both our current business operations and our disaster preparedness. After all, the business case should always be the driving factor.
So take the time now, while the memories are fresh and the hindsight in the front of our memory to understand how we can operate better on a daily basis, what we could do better in the case of a disaster, and what the business case of each is.
