CED

July 2014

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July 2014 | Construction Equipment Distribution | www.cedmag.com | 45 Business Recovery (continued on next page) telecommunications, and even damage to or destruction of your buildings." Safety Considerations According to Nelson, one key to keeping your business viable is the human factor. "As a business owner, you should always use the principle of 'Do the right thing,'" he said. "This will be beneficial to building goodwill, trust, and social capital with your employees and customers and will enhance your reputation and image in the community." Make sure you have an effective emergency evacuation plan that is exercised, so that people know what to do if there is an event. On the other hand, sometimes it makes more sense to stay put, so be sure you have a "shelter in place" plan for incidents in the event that leaving the premises is risky or dangerous. Locations Make plans for what you are going to do in recovery. "For example, if you have four feet of snow and the roof collapses, where are you going to go?" said Boyd. "What assets will you need at the new location? How are you going to get them there? It is difficult to figure this stuff out after the fact." Waiting till a crisis situation has erupted could mean that temporary real estate, facilities or other resources are already taken by other businesses. You need to firm up these arrangements ahead of time. Power One thing all businesses need is power, and after a disaster power may no longer be available for a period of time. "Almost no business owner knows how big of a genera- tor they will need to power their business, although your readers may know this, because they deal with heavy equipment," said Boyd. "Have an electrician look at your panel and let you know the size of the generator you will need. Then, if you lose power, you can rent or install one instantly." However, if you don't know the size you need, Protecting Your Business Information and Data "If you ask most businesses if they back up their data, most of them will say they do," said Bob Boyd, president and CEO of Agility Recovery. "However, just because data is backed up doesn't mean it can be recovered. It could be corrupted, or the owner may have forgotten to back up some important data, or forgot about a certain server." According to James Nelson, president of Business Continuity Services, if you lose your business information and data, you become, in essence, a start-up organiza- tion. "Make sure that business information and data are backed up and off-site from your business premises," he said. "This can be done for reasonable costs just using the Internet. As long as you have continued access to your business information and data, you can usually obtain the equipment that you need in order to continue business operations." One company providing data protection and recovery services, among other services, is ADP (www.adp.com). "With the increasing digitization of business, there is a greater value and risk being placed on this valuable asset," said Jeff Traylor, vice president of global hosting. "Fortu- nately, there is a wide array of technologies available to solidify and protect this digitized information." Providers such as ADP realize that small business owners aren't in the business of IT. Some don't have the economies of scale for capital outlays required to solidify and protect this information. In addition, since technol- ogies are changing so rapidly, anything that a small business owner does put in place today will quickly become obsolete. According to Traylor, the solution is to place these digi- tized assets into a "cloud" with a trusted cloud provider, to protect the information from the risks associated with disaster. Cloud computing is a technology that involves connecting a large number of computers through a real- time communications network. "If a disaster strikes, while the physical assets of the business may be damaged or destroyed, the company's information assets will remain safe," said Traylor. However, if a company were to lose its physical assets and its information, it would be difficult to come back. ADP operates two Tier-4 data centers. (Tier-4 provides the highest level of protection of the four tiers). These data centers are staffed 24/7/365 and can withstand extended regional power outages, winds, flooding, etc. They are also located away from areas prone to large natu- ral disaster, such as floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes. And, for further protection, all information is duplicated at both sites, so, in the unlikely event that one site became inoperable, everything would be available at the other site. One satisfied ADP customer is Edward Ehrbar, Inc., a heavy construction equipment distributor with locations in Yonkers and Holbrook, N.Y., and Danbury, Connecticut. The company relies on PFW IntelliDealerASP as its business information system. One reason the company selected this technology was because it would allow employees to work more efficiently and effectively, as well as avoid large capital expenditures. Another reason was that the system would provide disaster recovery and business continuity planning. "We can work from anywhere on ASP," said Edward Ahern, IT manager. And, such an event did happen. The day after Hurricane Sandy struck, Ahern was able to work from a distant location, where he had power and access to the Internet. "Because our system is on the ASP platform, that allowed me to respond to our customers' needs and requests," he said.

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