Disaster recovery, be it from either a man-made or natural calamity, is a hallmark of any good comprehensive risk mitigation strategy. After all, disasters can strike anytime, anywhere and the ability to have operational continuity can mean the difference between an organization remaining in business or going under depending on the circumstances. Given that very few organizations can afford to buy, store and maintain all of the necessary equipment they would need to remain operational during a significant emergency, most businesses are dependent upon companies that specialize in providing disaster recovery services.
I recently had the opportunity to tour a testing and logistics center located in metro Atlanta for one such company, Agility Recovery, to get a firsthand look at some of the equipment and services that they can provide to customers at a moment’s notice. For those businesses that could be severely hampered by a mission-critical office or call center going offline, Agility can provide them with mobile workspaces complete with voice and data communications that can be setup in as little as 48 hours.
At Agility’s centers in both Atlanta and Toronto, Vernon Cooper, the company’s director of operations, says one of their primary missions is to support customer test events which allow clients to work with the company’s IT staff to create a roadmap for recovering their operations using the equipment provided by Agility. One of the benefits of the Agility solution, according to Cooper, is that a customer doesn’t have to purchase every element of disaster recovery the company offers.
“Obviously, we have four components – power, communication, office space, and computers systems- but members don’t have to declare on all four. If it’s just a power need, they can just declare on a power need,” he says. “If they have a Dell server in their environment that crashes from a hardware failure and they say, ‘Hey, I ordered this server from Dell and it’s going to take them two weeks to replace it, can we use one of yours for two weeks?’ Sure. If they have a phone or an internet issue and they just need a CradlePoint device with two or three LTE cards inside of it so they can get quick internet and quick phones, we’ll send that overnight as well.”
Aside from some of the equipment that people would normally associate with business continuity, such as power generators, satellite communications technology and the like, Cooper says they provide every piece of the office environment imaginable, including desks, chairs, network cables, PCs, monitors, keyboards, mice, printers, storage devices, etc. On display at Agility’s logistics center in Atlanta is one of the company’s mobile units complete with all of the aforementioned equipment and various other amenities. The unit is essentially a double-wide trailer converted into a fully functioning office space that customers affected by a disaster can leverage for as long as needed.
Cooper says the company’s customers do not fit into any particular mold and can range from large, enterprise-type clients to small, mom and pop financial services firms. “It could be anything from a five-seat company to one that needs 1,000 seats from us,” he says.
The level of disaster preparedness also varies greatly among the company’s clientele.
“What we find is some industries that have compliance regulations that force them to the disaster recovery space; they are a little more sophisticated when it comes to the plan. They know exactly what they need to recover. They know exactly how long they can be down based on our relationship and what they need from us, so they come into the relationship with a very solid plan already,” Cooper explains. “Other companies that have us because maybe someone in their organization found the need for disaster recovery may not have that well-tuned plan that we would expect. So, in some cases, we may find ourselves walking through what they need even though we’re not their business continuity planners.”
While there are some organizations that place a premium on business continuity and make disaster recovery a focal point in their risk mitigation strategy, Cooper says there are others that do not and are sometimes stuck in the position of having to play catch up at an inopportune time.
“I would say that you have multi-faceted customers,” Cooper says. “There are some that clearly see the value in disaster recovery and are willing to invest in the infrastructure side of it because they know that is ultimately going to support the people side. You have other customers who feel like what they have pieced together is going to be enough or that they can go out and get the resources at the time of need. I feel those members find it more difficult at time of interruption because it is so much harder to get stuff when everyone else is trying to get it whereas if they had our resources or if they had us as a partner, in general, it would make things that much easier at time of interruption.”
Cooper recommends that companies have some sort of plan in place that is tested on a regular basis when it comes to disaster recovery whether it includes a company like Agility or not.
“Our members that have tested their plan are far more successful at time of interruption than those that have not," Cooper concludes. "It’s kind of like getting up every morning and putting on your pants. You could almost do that with your eyes closed but if you had never done it or only tried a few times, you might stumble and fall down a few times.”
