President’s Piece – October 2017

A message to customers and employees….

Hurricane Irma narrowly missed our company’s HQ in Florida when at the very last minute Irma turned a bit more east away from the Tampa Bay area on September 11.  Disaster recovery plans apply to more than just data centers as our First American team successfully demonstrated with what was at first a category 4 storm headed directly for the Tampa Bay area.  Approximately half of our employees are in the state so the storm was a concern to us as we run a 24/7 operation including alarm monitoring and emergency dispatch services.   As the storm approached we were able to switch some of our operations to other staff in Virginia and Texas as our Florida team headed for the high ground (which in Florida is not all that high).   While a bit tense over the several days we were very fortunate that all of the First American Team was safe and thankfully did not suffer too much damage.

Our team in other states were able to seamlessly pick up the operation and support our customers.   We did not have one missed SLA during the entire storm and transition.   While DR planning is a part of every IT organization, it’s impossible to predict all possible scenarios.   At First American we keep core records in our Cloud data base system so key information is accessible from anywhere our team has access – assuming of course there is electricity.   We had some staff off line for a period of time but with our broad nationwide footprint we are able to distribute the work geographically.

Thanks to all our employees for their extra efforts and for keeping our customer’s operations running smoothly during the storm.   It’s great to have a dedicated team and an understanding customer base.

Now, hopefully the calm sunny Florida weather will remain for a long long time.