Spotlight on $avings: SAU26
Server Implodes, Payroll Deadline Approaches - A Valuable Lesson in Business Continuity
It all started on a Monday afternoon. While installing software updates, SAU26's BudgetSense server malfunctioned. The hardware issues that caused the crash also corrupted their financial and payroll data. As a result, they were dead in the water; none of their staff could do their jobs.
And more critically, payroll for 732 employees had to be processed in time to send the direct deposit file to the bank by the Wednesday 2:00pm deadline.
SAU26 contacted UniFund for emergency help. Regrettably, Merrimack did not have a business continuity plan in place to handle situations like this. They did have a backup copy of their database, but no server to restore it on and to reinstall BudgetSense in time to meet the payroll deadline.
The only solution we could offer was for them to to drive all the way to UniFund's offices, to use UniFund's servers and recovery services. Fortunately for Merrimack, UniFund just happened to have equipment and IT people available to help. Merrimack arrived at UniFund first thing Wednesday morning with their staff and media backup. It took some time to load their data and BudgetSense on the rented equipment, but Merrimack was able to start payroll processing late that morning. SAU26 and UniFund staff members stayed late into the evening, working overtime to get the payroll processed.
A bullet was dodged. All 732 of Merrimack's employees were paid on time.
Says Matt Shevenell, "I'll sleep better now knowing that when trouble strikes again, we can be operational by being online to UniFund within a very short time frame and working once again right here in our Merrimack offices."
Merrimack ordered the necessary components from Dell to rebuild their BudgetSense server, and was operational once again on Friday. Their own server platform was down for most of the week. Matt Shevenell, SAU26's Business Manager states, "We lost more than $20,000 in productivity because our departments could not function while we were down. We learned the hard way that having a business continuity plan in place with UniFund could have saved us a lot of stress and frustration. We are now enrolled in UniFund's annual Disaster Recovery and Continuity Service."
The challenge for all business and IT managers is to make sure that mission critical functions like BudgetSense remain up and running. The real value of the UniFund Disaster Recovery and Continuity Service is not in the remote backup; it's in the continuity assurance that gets your payroll out in time.