California fires test companies' business continuity plans

We write about business continuity and disaster recovery, so the the wildfires raging through much of southern California can tell us much about how companies in the area have fared. eWeek’s Karen Schwartz writes that companies with solid business continuity plans seem to be weathering the disaster fairly well, while others may be more strongly affected by the crisis. Overland Storage of San Diego, for example, has been greatly affected by the wildfires, with many of its 260 employees in and around the city affected directly or indirectly. The company’s headquarters itself has not been threatened, but the sheer size of the fires has made it difficult for employees to travel to the office to answer tech support calls and perform other tasks. Employees continue to work remotely through secure VPM and a company-wide intranet, said company’s president Vern LoForti. In some cases, Overland Storage has rerouted direct office phone lines to home phones, and employees communicate via text message, since local authorities have requested that cell phone use be limited during the disaster, LoForti said. “Our reliance on secure networking technology has been instrumental in keeping our operations functioning while also enabling employees to retain some sense of normalcy in their daily work lives while dealing with a disaster of this magnitude,” he said. To ensure that customers are given prompt support, employees at other Overland Storage locations are jumping in to help. In addition, the company’s U.K. tech support team is responding to calls based in the United States to expedite responses.

Here is another way to prepare for disaster: At Kintera, the San Diego company’s product — a SAAS (software as a service) offering that helps organizations increase efficiency — has ensured that customer service will not be affected. “As a SAAS provider, we have measures in place that enable us to continuously provide our software solutions to our clients without interruptions, so the fires affecting our area have had minimal to no impact on the organizations we serve,” said CEO Rich LaBarbera. Most of Kintera’s San Diego-based employees have been affected to varying degrees, forcing the company to invoke its contingency plan. The plan includes a fault-tolerant system and redundant data centers that run independent of Kintera’s primary San Diego location. In addition, as part of the disaster recovery plan, the company has deployed employees to additional data centers, which enables Kintera to quickly switch primary operations from San Diego. In addition, all IT staff can work remotely with full access to all mission-critical systems, said CTO Scott Crowder.

Kintera has developed a business continuiuty plan and it is implementing it — but it does not plan to stop there. LaBarbera credits the company’s contingency plan for getting it through the crisis, but he plans to take another look at the way employees communicate during a crisis after the danger from the wildfires has passed. “During the past two days, we relied primarily on e-mail and instant messaging to communicate with employees on both company and personal matters. Although both were effective, in the future we may consider alternative technologies and systems that will help us better communicate with employees in times of crisis,” he said.