Just two months ago I wrote about summer storms and having a disaster recovery plan. Well, the Red Wing, MN office had a chance to experience this very problem, and try out our plan.

Last Saturday evening, we had an electrical storm that knocked out power for a few hours. When the power to the building came back on, not everything restarted the way it should have. Our file servers that hold all our database information needed to be restarted. All individual computers had to be manually turned back on, which prevented employees from logging into their computer from remote locations. And, the computerized phone system would not reboot at all.

Larry, our “computer wizard” and IT Manager, worked Sunday and had almost everything back up and running by the time everyone arrived at the office Monday morning. He had a technician arrive at the office first thing Monday to repair our phone system. Knowing that the repair would take some time, he already connected an old analog telephone to our fax line and rerouted our incoming phone numbers to all ring in on that line so we could at least take incoming calls.

While Roxie could take calls and log them into our customer service software for support technicians to return calls when the system came back up, with only one line, we didn’t have a way to make outgoing calls to answer support questions. Not wanting to make our customers wait an unknown amount of time to receive a call back, our support staff took it upon themselves to use their personal cell phones to make the return calls and take care of our customers even before the phone system was fixed.

This certainly doesn’t qualify as a major disaster, but it does show the importance of having the right people in place and a plan to get things back in operating condition. Thank you to our entire staff for pulling together and minimizing the effect of this temporary problem, and to our customers for being patient through this process.

Ken Hilton - President