Business Challenges:

Tornadoes impede business continuity; inability to easily test system For more than 15 years, service company Erica Lane Enterprises, Inc. (eLe) has provided government agencies with top-notch support services in IT, energy and engineering, facility operations and maintenance, logistics, and test and evaluation. The company is considered a national leader in the energy resource conservation industry and teams with such powerhouse partners as Lockheed Martin and Jacobs Engineering to provide many other critical support services to
NASA and various branches of the U.S. military.

But eLe’s reputation, expertise and strength in partners was not enough to stave off system downtime caused by the April 2011 tornado outbreak, one of the worst in U.S. history. “At the time, our DR plan was really just backing up our critical data with eVault,” said Erick Edstrom, information systems manager at eLe. “Our data was safe, but we had no way to keep our systems up and running if disaster hit.” Sure enough, eLe’s corporate office was down for the count for four full business days as a result of widespread power grid damage by the 2011 tornadoes affecting the entire region. It would have been out much longer, if not for a generator the eLe team purchased and
some creative workarounds by its IT department. “During those four days of downtime, productivity was obviously impacted,
and we had no way to maintain our Web portals,” recalled Edstrom. “In my estimation, it cost us roughly $5,000 a day in lost productivity.”

With an infinite number of tornado seasons looming, Edstrom knew eLe needed a disaster recovery solution that did more than just backup—something that would keep the company’s data, applications and systems going no matter what.