Friday Q&A: Business continuity with Ginnie Stouffer from IDC Partners

The holiday shopping season is again going to pack — our economy hopes — hordes of consumers into shops, malls and onto roads. The Liberty Bell is going to remain a practical militarized zone.
And while no one thinks the apocalypse is good for business, there is something to be said for having your business ready for disaster.
Wayne-based business continuity services company IDC Partners has built a business on that reality since 1991. They help companies prepare for the worst, and they’re using cool, local technology to do it.
Below, Ginnie Stouffer, vice president of consulting with IDC, takes her 15 years of industry experience to tell us about the cool technologies they implement to keep their clients ready for the worst and just what disaster movie is the favorite of someone who thinks plenty about disaster.

Edited for length and clarity.
Short of building a cement bunker, what do you do for a new business client?

We provide services at all levels to help the organization develop or improve their disaster readiness plan. That’s about technical services, retaining your customers, continuing your customer service, managing accounts 24/7 and project management. Everything that IDC does is focused on the resilience of the business and industry.
What we try to do is help them understand their business. What does your business depend on: people and technology, probably a dependency on a physical location. Once they understand that, we can help implement a plan that prepares for when those things aren’t available — those people, that technology or your place — to keep their business moving and reducing the impact of a disaster.
When you say disaster, do we mean, like, Bruce Willis can’t destroy the Texas-sized asteroid that is headed straight for us?
The old-fashioned definition is a sudden calamitous event that causes destruction so that the business can’t work at that location. That’s the old definition. A new definition is any interruption that stops a business from producing whatever it is that business does.
This all changed in the 1990s because before then, PCs weren’t proliferated so we were still using green screens and mainframes. The proliferation of PCs and client software creates a need to think beyond that single piece of technology and instead imagine how HR or accounting or your production line will react when their technology isn’t available. We have a huge dependence on technology and any disaster can remind us just that.
Give us an example of what this looks like in practice.

We work in a broad range of capacities, but we can talk about the hospital environment. What we’ve done for a large, well-known hospital, someplace we’ve been working for four years, the first thing that happens is that someone reports a system outage in that hospital. The system is set up so we’re doing to do troubleshooting to find out, say, maybe a broken pipe or whatever else means that they can no longer have functional technology in that wing. What do you do next? How do you order the new equipment, who configures it, what are the steps for replacing that wing? What if everything was destroyed?
What are some of the technology partnerships you’re leveraging?
The move in the industry today for business resiliency is to decrease the dependence any physical location or system. IDC is pushing on cloud computing, We have hosted VoIP with [Old City-based] Alteva that we manage through a Web interface so we can point lines someplace else for remote officing.
We’re using Web-based ticket service [SaaS application] Salesforce, which offers the tools we use for managing [a customer interface]. Enabling LogMeIn Rescue to work with Salesforce is giving us the opportunity to manage servers and desktops remotely. This is all hosted through the Internet.
All of our systems are hosted in Bethelem at DBSi, a recovery vendor that provides co-location and hosting service like IBM and HP. It’s an independent vendor with multiple locations, and since we are in the Valley Forge-King of Prussia area, their Bethlehem location is just 35 miles drive time but out of the main area.
Update: We selected their Valley Forge location for our Work Recovery seats, it is just 10 minutes from our office.
What company is too small to be preparing for disaster? Do you want me to warn my local corner store?
It sounds outlandish, but even mom and pop companies need to think about this. If you’re dealing with any kind of regulation or an industry that uses regulation, you don’t want to lose that information and need to know how to react without it.
This all started in the mainframe environment in the 1970s, but now, yes, even the corner storefront is probably using a desktop for point of sale equipment. If something happens to that computer, they don’t know how much they have in stock, they can’t produce a report for regulation. You’d be surprised how many times people can’t think before computer age. They just don’t know how to do it, no matter your size, that matters.
So what’s really at risk here?

Philadelphia is a target and has always been listed on a terrorist target list because of all the national interest here. So, Philly itself is a whole lot different than Scranton. A terrorist attack could target just one facility, but what happened in New York [on 9/11] closed 10 square blocks for a month, even if they didn’t have a broken window. Those businesses were completely interrupted. Anyone with a business in Philly has to have a fear of that negatively impacting your business.
The Valley Forge and King of Prussia interchange is a big risk, too. The King of Prussia Mall is also a target whenever there is big holiday shopping.
What is your favorite disaster movie?
[laughs] I like them all.
Every Friday, Technically Philly brings you an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia’s technology community. See others here.