Issue link: https://www.viewpoint.com/resource-library/i/1122217
The president of one of our companies is 77 years old — we have many generations in one building. But what we're doing now in the cloud just blows their minds. — Gene Krejci, Chief Financial Officer SOLUTION Communication failures complicated things for the Beyer workforce, but they made it through the storm and came out the other side with a lesson learned. Quickly after the storm, Beyer relocated where its website was hosted and, within a few days, brought email, communications and Spectrum servers back online for remote workers, because the majority of its employees were remoting in. "We had several post-action meetings with public officials, disaster recovery consultants, documenting everything thoroughly to see how we could do it better next time," Krejci said. The one thing that kept resurfacing was that server room on-prem, housing the most critical functions of the company. Beyer executives knew they could spend more money to reinstate the server room to pre-Harvey conditions, and even more money on backup plans to protect it in the event of another hurricane ... or simply move to the cloud. Krejci said management knew what they needed to do … Beyer was headed to the cloud by moving to the cloud version of Spectrum. "The cloud consists of other people's servers — where they worry about hardware, they worry for us about every second of downtime," he said, "Next time we're in a situation, I won't have to call someone and say 'go to the office and press this green flashing button,' while the entire company waits to see the outcome." After a storm put their on-prem servers underwater and locked employees out of Spectrum, the system holding their most vital organizational data, it was unanimous that the long-term viability of the company lay in the cloud. "It was an easy move after the hurricane. We decided to go to the cloud with as much as we could. It took less than a week for us to come to the decision to move," Krejci said. "We knew this was a thing we had to do, so it made the choice easier to make. I don't remember [the move] even taking one day. No downtime, and it was truly no different than our original setup, but we noticed that it was snappier, quicker, especially when we were away from campus. We never lost any data, so never had anything to recover," he said.