Recovery after a disaster involves more than data and office space

One lesson Bill Boyd learned in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is that recovery from a disaster entails much more than simply restoring the critical functions of a business. “What we’ve learned … is that it’s not just having the computers or having the business model, or knowing what computers they need, although those are all important. It’s getting involved in how they recover, and where their people are, and making things work with them,” says Boyd, chairman of North Carolina-based Agility Recovery Solutions.

Agility was active helping many New Orleans operations, including insurance agencies, recover after Katrina hit in August 2005. Last summer the company held a meeting with its customers in the New Orleans area to assess what went wrong as well what worked for the its clients. One of Agility’s customers told Boyd that one service he would have liked to have been able to provide to his 100 employees after Katrina hit was access to an expert on how to deal with an insurance adjuster. Every one of the client’s employees “was dealing with an adjuster about their house,” Boyd says. “… They were talking to people from all over the country. And they felt bad, they were under pressure and they weren’t coming to work because of it.”

Still, Boyd says, Agility was able to help get the company back up and running logistically. They were “awfully glad we got the computers in; they were awfully glad we got them office space. They were awfully glad the telephone worked and that they’d gotten it fast. … The things that we were advising them to do were logical things that if you’re inside of a company that is falling apart, you can’t think about.”

He noted that “most companies don’t have much of a plan. People back up their data, but they’re not sure where the data is.” Agility uses what it calls a “Road Map” when working with a client to get a disaster plan in place. In addition to gathering information about the company’s servers and computers, how many people are involved, what they want their telephone system to be like and what their power requirements are, Boyd says it’s important to deal with people issues. Those include knowing where employees are, how they will get to work and how the calling tree will function.

“We do three or four different physical things,” Boyd said. “One is that we provide office space. Now that office space historically, and in many cases with Katrina and the storms in Florida, is mobile office space. … We move them in, we set them up. They have fax machines and tables and chairs and bathrooms and all of those kinds of things.”

In the case of one New Orleans insurance agency, Agility was able to relocate the firm to a permanent office space, install satellite phone systems and bring in power generators. “Then we put their computer system back in; we worked with them to get their data downloaded,” he said.

Boyd said in order to be able to provide his customers with immediate recovery services, the infrastructure has to be set up in advance. “We have a big network of people who can do these things, most of whom come from our suppliers.”

The company started out as a unit of GE. About four years ago it was purchased by an investment firm and the company looked at insurance agents as potential customers, not only because they were likely candidates for Agility’s services but because of their role as advisors to other businesses.

“The insurance agent was the first one we went to, because every single guy in the market has an insurance agent,” Boyd said. “You would not have them if you don’t trust them. … His customer does not call him very often; they call him when they have a disaster and he better be there. … Insurance agents know that, they realize they have a promise to their customer and the promise is only questioned every few years, maybe only once in a business lifetime.”

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