When Catastrophe Strikes Are You Prepared to Weather the Storm?

Every business is vulnerable to disruptions. Following in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, homes and businesses up and down the eastern seaboard were literally left powerless as transformers blew and trees ripped down power lines, creating widespread and long-lasting outages.

In many organizations, it’s the CIO who is often the first responder in the face of a business emergency. After they make sure employees are safe, the next course of action is ensuring business continuity and stability of systems.

Any IT leader who has lived through a disaster knows the importance of having a comprehensive business continuity plan to ensure their systems get up and running as quickly and smoothly as possible to support and sustain normal business operations. Part of that plan includes selecting business partners who put the same emphasis on disaster recovery and business continuity preparation. This is particularly important as core enterprise services leave the local data center and take up residence in the cloud.

Any interruption in service or loss of data can have huge financial implications in nearly every business. When Hurricane Sandy struck, many of our clients were in the midst of their month-end IT financial and business management reporting production cycles. As a result of ComSci’s disaster recovery capabilities, these processes continued uninterrupted and remained on schedule.

More than simply having a prepared partner, using strategic partners like ComSci, as part of the enterprise IT solution, can introduce added resiliency into IT infrastructure. Single points of failure have given way to a mesh of dispersed services connected by reliable and redundant networks. ComSci’s own continuity-of-business and disaster-recovery plans follow or exceed industry best practices, with fail over protection so that businesses continue to have high availability of their data and operational functions. Additionally, ComSci’s systems are routinely tested for optimal functionality and revised periodically to accommodate for new systems, networks, devices and applications.

IT financial and business management (ITFBM) solutions play a key role in today’s best-practices approach to managing the expenses and consumption of IT products and services. However, the right ITFBM partner does more than offer technology – they add value to the enterprise by serving as an extended partner, bringing IT financial and business management best-practices, processes, methodologies, expertise and intimate domain-knowledge. And, in the face of crisis, they are prepared to see you through and help you weather the storm.

To help people affected by Hurricane Sandy and other disasters, consider donating to the Red Cross.