Save Of The Month: Tales From the Front Lines
Analyzing the Save
It isn’t uncommon for us to meet with new prospects at their most critical moments. Sometimes, it isn’t until after disaster hits that they realize they need help. In the case of this month’s save, that’s exactly what happened.
Our partner was preparing to meet with a new prospect when out of nowhere, the power in their building went out. This outage took their on-site servers down, leaving the business unable to work. In an effort to get back up and running, a team of four tech experts and two supervisors worked round the clock in eight-hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day, to recover what they could. It took them a full week of this around-the-clock shift work before their operations functioned normally again. Despite their best efforts, they lost a lot of revenue in downtime and had to redo over a week’s worth of work product lost.
The executive staff quickly realized that they could never let this happen again. They called their SDV partner for guidance. Together, they discussed how to approach these types of situations moving forward. They also reviewed best practices for protecting their servers. Instead of offering a one size fits all solution, SDV, and our partner recommended that their IT department visit each business unit within their company (accounting, HR, finance, production, operations, Etc,) and identify their most critical applications. It was recommended not to have a deep dive technical discussion, rather, they were instructed to ask simple questions like “Which applications need to be available at all times?” and “Which applications can be recovered within an hour, a day, or a week?”
Unlike most meetings they had attended before their disaster, SDV and our partner did not offer a canned solution. We offered a strategy to fit their specific needs. By aligning the conversation to their priorities, SDV is able to design a solution tailored to the organization’s needs and the IT department was able to make informed decisions about the services they would need to move forward.