All areas of the business are important to success, but the clearing of inbound freight is especially critical. Ships and planes do not cease operations when our offices are inaccessible. If a regional disaster like a major hurricane affects one place, the rest of the USA is still in business.
The Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) has three principal elements:
- Essential Personnel
- Site Restoration and Management
- Systems and Information Management
Our Essential Personnel are the people who first and foremost put the plans together. They are the trained people, executive and non-executive, who put the plan into motions. They are trained in knowing who to contact and where to seek resources. They’re the ones most critical to making sure that the plans are set into motion, and that they are followed.
Site Restoration and Management goes into effect to make sure that the physical buildings are still functioning. Most commonly, for low-level disruptions like extended power outages or immediate storm recovery, this involved making sure that the sites are powered, heated, and have connections for phone and internet.
At each location, there are generators and fuel on-site to restore power through an extended outage, and ensure that the buildings can be heated in winter situations. In the event that roads are impassable or impractical to use, critical employees can work via secure connections.
For the Systems and Information Management, work that employees do is constantly being backed up in real time to redundant data centers. There are backup servers in multiple locations around the USA to make sure that there are redundancies when the data is backed up, so there is no loss of information if a data center loses power. This means that even if an office were extremely badly damaged by a major weather event, JMR would be able to continue uninterrupted.
Most years we face small tests to this plan, and it remains robust. Disruptions to municipal electricity and water following a series of heavy snow and ice storms to our drawback offices could have left the doors closed for weeks, but with prepared staff and facilities we were able to have staff continuing to work on filing claims.
Situations like this happen yearly but our big test was when Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast 2012. Widespread power outages for weeks along with fuel shortages paralyzed much of the area, but within hours, JM Rodgers was working. For a time, our office stood out at night as the only lights visible nearby, as our preparedness had allowed us to continue working through the aftermath, with our clients experiencing no disruption.
We know that it is important for all our clients to have a reliable business partner, and having our comprehensive disaster recovery plan is one way we give that to our clients. If you’d like to learn more, please contact our VP of Sales Andrew Galloway at agalloway@jmrodgers.com or 973-726-5340.
