CSU Industries, a leading IT support and advisory firm headquartered in New York, presented its firsthand experience with disaster preparedness and recovery at the Gartner Catalyst Conference, held July 29 – August 1, 2013 in San Diego. Matt Seif, VP of CSU, discussed “How CSU Industries Kept Users Productive in the Aftermath of Superstorm Sandy” at the industry’s premier event focused on the convergence of mobile, cloud, and big data in transforming IT and reshaping the way business is conducted.
Due to a close working relationship with Microsoft, CSU has participated in the development of past, current, and future Windows Server and client operating system releases. This partnership led to CSU’s early adoption of Microsoft Server 2012 Hyper-V, a technology that was critical in keeping the company’s operations running at full capacity even in the midst of a natural and national disaster.
In the session, Seif attributed CSU’s ability to ‘weather the storm’ to a combination of virtualization, staff dedication and excellent planning. CSU’s disaster recovery (DR) planning included a comprehensive business continuity plan; a hosted, redundant phone system; decentralized inventory; cross-training of responsibilities across departments; and a global distribution of staff. In addition, the company carried out extensive testing of its DR plans by conducting comprehensive failover drills.
Seif, joined by Steve Rubin, President of WorkITSafe, then led an open discussion about the power of virtualization and the private cloud, and how the technology helped CSU ensure their clients experienced business as usual during the storm. For access to the case study or for more information about CSU and its professional DR planning services, visit www.csuindustries.com.
