DELRAY BEACH, Fla. -
Having the right technology in place to support a business has never been more important, especially in recent years as the country has had to deal with various natural disasters, such as hurricanes, flooding and more.

Fleet Lease Disposal (FLD) learned this firsthand when Hurricane Wilma struck the Florida coast, and has turned its gained knowledge in recovery plans into something the whole industry can put to good use.

When Hurricane Wilma struck the Florida coast in 2005, a true business nightmare quickly became a reality for FLD. Wilma’s destruction left FLD’s main office — and primary data center — inoperable for four months. 
Prior to Wilma, FLD had a disaster recovery plan in place. However, like many businesses, FLD soon learned that their plan was outdated. Recovering to their backup office in New Jersey proved to be a long and painstaking process and FLD discovered they had limited bandwidth to support remote users, aging hardware and lack of redundancy in power, cooling and connectivity at their secondary site.
FLD has used the years following Wilma to overhaul the company’s disaster recovery plan, from a performance and cost efficiency standpoint. Having seen the devastating impact a natural disaster can have on a company in the remarketing industry, FLD is sharing its experiences with the industry to reiterate the importance of an up-to-date and responsible disaster recovery plan.
FLD has turned to a “cloud computing” approach to disaster recovery. Partnering with iland (www.iland.com), all of FLD’s crucial data is now backed up off-site on secure severs. In the event of a disaster, iland would be able to restore FLD’s systems immediately, ensuring that all data is kept safe and that customers do not experience any disruption in service.
FLD also realized significant cost savings by turning to cloud computing. Over a three-year period, FLD has saved $9,000 on software costs, $30,000 on Internet access and more than $200,000 in hardware costs. Additionally, FLD has decreased IT man hours by more than 272 hours annually and has increased productivity in all offices by 25 percent during failover tests.
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