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Private Cloud Protects Ohio Clients From June 13th Storm

The June 13th storm severely impacted many Ohio residents. How did you fare?

In Cincinnati, a violent storm poured rain and blowing winds that reached 70mph. In the Toledo area in Northwest Ohio, WTVG Weather reported nearly 17,000 lightning strikes with winds up to 75mph.

As of the morning of June 14th, 84,000 Cincinnati area residents in Southwest Ohio were without power. FirstEnergy was reporting about 50,000 customers without power on Tuesday morning in the Toledo area. South Central Ohio had AEP Ohio reporting nearly 62,000 customers without power.

“Crews worked through the night to make repairs, but damage is severe and widespread,” reads a statement by Duke Energy. “In the areas hardest hit, we may need to adjust our initial estimated times of restoration to account for the isolated nature of the damage incurred.”

As of Wednesday, June 15th, more than 180,000 Ohioans were still without power. In the days since, extreme heat and the resulting strain on damaged infrastructure saw both lingering outages and planned blackouts in some areas, while crews worked to make repairs.

No Power Means No Functioning Hardware

Many businesses and organizations are unable to work and provide vital services as a result of the power outage. This is especially dire when you consider the impact on vital servers, which contain their data and applications.

This is a key issue that could have been avoided by making use of the cloud.

Even after the experience of the pandemic and so many people working remotely, some businesses and unfortunately organizations have chosen to still not make the much-needed move to the cloud. This old adage seems quite appropriate… “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Private Cloud Services Keep Clients Connected & Productive

Clients using our Private Cloud were able to continue to work uninterrupted and provide the critical services needed by those they serve. We are proud to say our Data Center remained active and experienced zero downtime during the storm.

In one unfortunate case, a client had us prepare an implementation on their Private Cloud for them, however, they had yet to greenlight the move, despite repeated urging from our team.

The day after the storm, as their offices continued to have no power and their server battery back-ups were depleting or depleted, they reached out to us and said, “I guess I should have listened to you… nobody can do their work.”

The move has now been greenlit and our team will move as quickly as possible to get them transitioned to be best prepared for whatever may come.

The Importance Of Cloud-Based Business Continuity

Preparing for business interruptions (both natural and human-based) is critical in order to make sure you can stay up and running, regardless of whether the outage is at the office, in your town or around the world.

Business Continuity planning is one of the most important requirements of management at a business. If a disaster does occur, the cost of disruptions will be significantly reduced with a cloud solution in place.

There will be no disruptions to your supply chain. Your competitive position will be maintained or even improved because you’ll be able to meet your contractual requirements, whereas others who aren’t protected won’t.

In addition to reliable data backup capability, effective Business Continuity planning will get your business up and running with as little downtime as possible.

It provides you with a robust set of tools to give your business the best chance to reopen and recover quickly, and with as little damage as possible to your operations and reputation.

Do you have a cloud-based Business Continuity redundancy in place? Or could you use our help?