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Teams went to each location to salvage equipment and take inventory. They brought whatever equipment they could find to Motazedi's basement, now turned into a NOC. Techs also contacted Zenith Infotech, eFolder and Datto to get the last image backed up to the cloud.
"Luckily, most of them didn't see patients that Sunday so they all had valid data good as of Friday night or Saturday morning," Motazedi said. "The problem we were running into is they needed the patient information. Their server was up, but they had no way to access it. We had clients coming to my basement, logging onto their server. We provided printers and scanners so they could print out reports and their schedule of patients."
Meanwhile, SNC Squared was ordering laptops, UPSes and other equipment, knowing that customers were going to need new products to resume business.
Craig Hillyard, CEO of Network Data Services, one of Motazedi's peers from Heartland Tech Groups, arrived Monday to help with that task. "We came to the decision that if we don't order it now, when are we going to get it in? It took us three days to get the equipment in so now when people have [new] offices we've got the ability to get them back up and put equipment in their office today, whereas a lot of other people are just saying, 'Well, what do we need?' " Hillyard said. "John's way ahead of the ballgame and he's actually got doctors operational and [they] have the ability to see patients and access the systems. We're on Day 5 of a major tornado wiping out an area. His business is functional and his clients are up and running. It's phenomenal."
Motazedi is understandably proud of the fact his business was back only five business hours after his office was demolished. He cautioned other VARs to make sure they would be able to do the same if disaster strikes. Before you can help your clients, he said, the first step is to make sure your own business is back first.
"Can you come up in five hours? If you can't or don't have a plan, you can't help your customers. There's no way. If you've got a house in shambles, chaos in your business or your business doesn't even exist, you can't help anybody," Motazedi said. "You need a good strategy in place in terms of what's going to actually happen, how are you going to roll it out and then practice it."
Coincidentally, SNC Squared had done a test run a week before the tornado hit, shutting down servers to see if it could boot up from its backups.
"We came up just fine [but] that's stuff everybody puts by the wayside," he said. "And don't be afraid to ask for help. I posted something on Facebook that said, 'This is my new office', and it was a picture of my 'new office.' I got up Sunday morning not knowing that by Sunday night I would go through a major disaster. I wasn't planning on it. It was just a beautiful day."
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