A significant percentage of the nation’s advisory firms call New England home. One snowstorm after another has battered the region lately.
A total of four feet of snow fell upon Portland, Maine in recent storms. The drifts grew so high Teresa Hough’s car slid off her driveway as she was pulling out last week. The Alaskan native and senior compliance administrator at R.M. Davis ($2.8B in AUM) says this season’s snowfall has been as bad as the great Northwest’s.
Fortunately, Hough has been working on augmenting her firm’s BCP. It got a real-life test when an approaching blizzard prompted a state of emergency. The firm closed for a day. “We rarely close,” says COO/CCO Wendy Laidlaw. Staff were able to work from home. Laidlaw even processed payroll remotely. There were no power outages.
Her TIPs: keep information on how to phone or text staff at home. If need be, she and Hough would have split the text-tree duties. Don’t use e-mail because not everyone may have access to it. Text is the way go. “It seems everyone has his cell phone,” says Hough.
Getting the jump on the flakes
As forecasts warned of the recent blizzard, a CCO in Massachusetts contacted his firm’s IT vendor. He wanted to make sure the system’s off-site server would be ready if needed – and that the IT vendor had his own backup plan.
“I’m literally staring at probably a 12- to 14-foot snow drift right now out my window,” says the CCO, who loves the winter. Valiant efforts by snow crews enabled most staff to come to work except for the day the governor shut down the roads.
More than three feet of snow has toppled upon Woburn, Mass., home of Garrett Nagle & Company ($116M in AUM) in recent weeks. “It’s pretty annoying at this point,” says CCO Garrett Nagle, Jr. “I’ve seen a lot of storms but we’ve never had this type of back-to-back-to-back” dumpers.
Remote access saved the firm, although most staffers live nearby and were able to make it to work, he says. The firm stresses safety first. His tip is to remember to leave your office computers on so they can be accessed remotely.
Experience pays off
A Boston CCO reported that staff were ably working from home during last week’s storm, tapping away in full “BCP mode” via VPN and Citrix. “We have had a lot of practice the last few years with the big snowstorms, hurricanes, and the Marathon bombing,” says the CCO (IA Watch, April 22, 2013).
The Massachusetts CCO speaks of the benefits of cross training workers. Everyone knows how to do another person’s job in case circumstances limit staffing. He also tested the system’s backup server last year. All of the firm’s servers back up to a secondary server onsite. Every hour, the data on that secondary server is backed up to an off-site server, says the CCO.
The setup at R.M Davis is referred to as a “warm-site” and “a hot-site.” The former is backed up nightly. The firm could be connected to it within 24 hours. The latter location is a copy of the data on the firm’s main server and is but a switch away from full use.
Testing the firm’s disaster recovery capabilities helped Hough to devise the concept of a “fail-back” option. This would involve how to turn to the firm’s remote server housed with a vendor in Phoenix. She’s also been working on adding new scenarios to her BCP, such as what if there was a fire that was limited only to the firm’s computer network room? What if the building was accessible but not the network? What if cell phone service were limited? Hough plans to apply her one-step or two-step disaster recovery plans to these new scenarios.
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