The be Prepared 20/20 Foresight Promotion Disaster RecoveryF
Fire — Case Study Premier Land Surveying – Could your business still be a business?
My customer had this event happen to them we had them covered; they were still able to work. Could your business be ready to work in a few moments after a fire?
My IT vendor Arnold Consulting just left my office. They were doing work on decommissioning the domain controller, in an effort to turn the network back to a simpler to manage model for me. They suggested, I replace the slow laptop they were using to make the changes to the domain.
After they left, as I was doing office work. I charged up the laptop sitting on top of my SurveyGPS box on a tile floor. I heard a small explosive sound only to turn around and see that a flame shooting out of the battery compartment. The laptop that Arnold Consulting was using is on fire. Flames were coming out about a foot and half high for a second or two, and then went down to three inches.
As it went on, the smoke of burning plastic was terrible. Firemen had this huge fan that blew out 90% of the smoke out of the house. Of course, soot all over the place and for a long time after there was still the smell of burnt plastic.
The computer that held all my survey information was intact, but the work space was not usable. Arnold Consulting is the company that I rely on for my backups on my computer system and disaster recovery.
They got a good backup from the night before, and they were able to put my computer into a virtual machine at their office. I was able to connect to the workstation where ever I was. My family and I stayed five nights at my parents’ house, and I connected to the computer at Arnold Consulting and was able to work just like on my original computer.
I had a disaster; a fire is about as bad as it gets. I thank God that I was home, and my family and business did not get hurt. If the fire got my main workstation, I still would have been ok.
As Rick, the owner of Arnold Consulting, was explaining, it would not have been the end of my business. The software he uses for disaster recovery can what he calls it, “re-image” to an entirely different set of hardware.
If the fire did get the workstation, he went on to say, “We just would have bought parts for a new one and re-imaged the computer to new hardware.” All your programs and data would be exactly as they were before, but on different computer hardware. I saw what he did with the virtual machine, and I thought it was amazing.
When I first became a customer, I thought the yearly cost was high. However, now, I look at it as an insurance payment each year on my data and business.
