Richard Trivedi, founder and chief executive of tech consulting firm CadreNet, never thought he’d see businesses coping with worse disruptions than they did after Sept. 11, but Superstorm Sandy trumped even that horrendous day. “After the destruction of the World Trade Center, almost all of our clients were still up and running—with the exception of one small securities firm, whose operations we moved into our own offices so they could keep going,” Mr. Trivedi said. By contrast, after Sandy, “the power outages and flooding have been so widespread, we’ve had many more customers calling us with major problems,” he said.
Headquartered on Staten Island, CadreNet, which Mr. Trivedi started in 1994, has about 200 clients—all of them small businesses—in and around the city. On top of toiling around the clock to get those companies back online and, in many cases, to retrieve essential data that went missing when the lights went out, CadreNet’s staff of six engineers helped set up a Coast Guard command post on Staten Island where 137 people from six government agencies are working to clean up the havoc Sandy left behind.
In a recent conversation, Mr. Trivedi talked about Sandy’s impact, and about what small businesses need to do now to protect themselves against future catastrophes.
Why didn’t the hurricane disrupt CadreNet’s own operations?
Luckily, our offices are in a part of Staten Island that didn’t get flooded, and we have plenty of backup [generators], so we’ve been able to keep running while so many of our clients had no power. We notified the Chamber of Commerce that we’re volunteering our services to clients and nonclients alike. One business set up temporary quarters in our conference room here, and we’ve been working with our landlord [developer Nicotra Group] to find empty office space we can move companies into. We’ve also been providing business owners with gas generators in their houses, so they can use their homes as backup locations if their usual places of business are flooded or without power.
Many businesses were unprepared for a storm of Sandy’s magnitude. What’s the biggest problem you’ve seen?
Well, archives of email and other crucial data are almost impossible to get back once they’re lost, unless you’ve either stored all of that on the cloud—that is, on servers that are far away geographically—or you’ve backed everything up at more than one location. Many of our clients had already backed up their data at our facility in New Jersey, but people who didn’t have off-site backup lost everything.
In addition to archiving your data remotely, you need a plan. We’re now making sure we meet with all our clients to look at worst-case scenarios, meaning: What happens if another superstorm hits? Where will employees go if they have to evacuate a company’s main location? How will you keep the business up and running in an emergency? We didn’t routinely do this kind of planning in the past, but Sandy brought home to us that there is a need for it.
Are small businesses generally receptive to the idea of disaster planning?
They are now. Small companies usually don’t have big IT budgets. But fortunately, the technology exists to make everything completely disaster-proof, and it’s gotten cheaper lately. For example, you can archive your email on the cloud for $7 or $8 a month per user. For a small business that relies on one server, $5,000 or so per year is enough to replicate that server at a second location, so that you can keep operating from that alternate place with minimal disruption. Before Sandy, small businesses with very tight IT budgets often didn’t think about any of this, but Sandy has taught us that it’s worth a bit of extra money to safeguard the continuity of your business.
What are you advising business owners to do?
One problem with this storm was that the power was out for so many days. It’s never been out for so long before. Even Verizon had so many issues this time—lots of companies were completely cut off from their phones, Internet, everything. And that may never happen again, but what if it does? One solution we recommend is to get set up with a wireless router as a backup. For instance, [4G wireless Internet provider] Clear.com is inexpensive and, after Sandy, clients of ours who had it found that it worked when nothing else did.
Any other advice?
Yes. Once you have a disaster plan in place, don’t just forget about it. Do quarterly testing. Conducting a disaster drill on a regular basis will help you make sure everything is working and will be there for you when you need it.