Safe IT Even in a Blizzard

Is Your IT Blizzard Ready?

Last week Chicago businesses were hit hard by the snow. Offices were closed, employees were stranded at home, and little real work happened (unless you own a snow plow company). The question I want to ask today is, was your IT ready for the snow?

There are two parts to having snow-ready IT management. The first also applies to any other major weather event. If the power goes out, if a tree lands on your building, if the heat goes off, will the physical IT within your building be safe? Do you have facilities in other states that depend on your servers being up all the time? Is your IT monitored so that you’ll know if a server goes down in the middle of a storm? MotherG’s clients received phone calls notifying them when their servers went down due to power outages (and phone calls when we brought them back up). MotherG’s clients knew they had secure backups of their important data and backup power supply to gently shut down their servers when the power crashed. One MotherG client even received a special delivery of a backup generator to bring servers back up when ComEd couldn’t. MotherG’s clients didn’t have to worry about their IT being safe and stable during the blizzard. Whatever our clients need, we’ll take care of their IT.

The other aspect of being IT snow ready is having a plan for remote workers. For most types of businesses, employees can still be productive working remotely. Even if your office doesn’t allow remote work on a normal basis, are you set up so employees can plug in and get to work on snow days? Do your employees have someone to call when they are having trouble logging in from home? MotherG’s help desk was open during the snow storm, ready to answer any questions from our clients.

It’s true that the blizzard of 2011 was bigger than most. But every year Chicago encounters at least a handful of major weather issues. Are you confident your IT is protected during the storm? Not sure? A free IT assessment from MotherG can help you find out!