Christchurch’s resilient business community
As Christchurch is shaking off the dust, an army of companies have been working to get the business sector up and running again. IT providers have played a large part in that, but no company has really been able to remain unaffected."Even those companies not directly affected by the earthquakes have been indirectly affected through customers, suppliers or business partners,” says Peter Townsend, CEO of the Canterbury Employers' Chamber of Commerce (CECC) and leader of Recover Canterbury (see box).Townsend, who has had more than 20 people from the CECC working from his home for more than 140 days, because their office in the CBD has been damaged by the earthquakes, says the economy in the region is looking much better that anyone would have thought."The economy in the Canterbury region is running on 90-95% of its normal capacity. That is an amazing result so soon after one of the worst disasters to have hit this country.”From the response he has heard through both Recover Canterbury and CECC, the main concern today for the affected companies is insurance."There is still a lot of uncertainty around insurance, as well as around the length of time it will take to start the reconstruction of the affected areas.”Yet, he says it’s positive that Christchurch is a very well insured city, and explains he has done a lot of research in this area, which confirms the high proportion of insured companies in this region.Townsend points out that a lot of new jobs have been created in the rebuilding of the town."Out of our more than 3000 members, very few have actually left town after the earthquakes. The growth in jobs in construction will more than offset the jobs lost by companies leaving or closing.”Council considering locationTechnology companies are naturally among the affected businesses. Twenty small-to-medium-sized businesses have formed a group known as Enterprise Precinct and Innovation Campus (EPIC), which has been created to stimulate growth of high innovation in the Central City. It will ultimately be home to more than 440 employees working for more than 30 small-to-medium-sized businesses providing innovative technology solutions to a global market.The group has approached the Christchurch City Council, asking for support to provide a temporary location to relocate 30 earthquake-displaced IT businesses following the February earthquake.The Council has stated it will consider granting the group temporary use of the council-owned former Para Rubber site, on the corner of Tuam and Manchester Streets, to develop an IT cluster in the area.Christchurch City Council deputy mayor Ngaire Button says technology is seen as one of the key areas to develop new business opportunities and promote strong economic growth in the Central City."Establishing the innovation campus will enable the 30 businesses to continue operating, attract skilled workers and protect growth through the development of collaborative business opportunities.”Shaun Ryan, CEO of SLI Systems, one of the companies in the EPIC group, says it is fantastic Council is looking to support IT companies."This is a unique opportunity to create a collaborative work environment that will allow our innovative companies to flourish. It will create long term employment and help bring some energy back to the heart of the city. It’s not something we could do alone,” says Ryan.The Christchurch City Council is also looking for temporary offices for its own staff as the Civic Offices in Hereford Street remains off limits. It has decided to convert the Rexel building in Lichfield Street into temporary offices for 379 staff to move into in mid to late August.Staff moving into the new facility are currently based at Christchurch Art Gallery and Papanui and Fendalton libraries, which are closed to the public. Many of these staff are scheduled to return to the Civic Offices in a staged manner from October, once repairs to the building are completed.Lessons learned from clientsOne of the many affected companies, who were also called upon to help with the emergency operations right after the quakes, is print solutions provider Fuji Xerox.Xerox's own offices were affected by the earthquakes. Neil Whittaker, managing director, Fuji Xerox New Zealand, says fortunately none of his staff members or their families were among the fatalities."Yet, many of our staff suffered hardship with basic amenities such as water supply and basic sanitation unavailable for many days. The Fuji Xerox office in Christchurch suffered some damage but within 48 hours we were running operationally 24/7 to support our customers,” he says.In the days after the February quake Fuji Xerox’s service was severely disrupted because of the closure of the CBD and the severe transport limitations from around the city, which impacted the movement of their field based support teams and also the distribution of spare parts for equipment. As their Christchurch branch acts as their distribution hub for the South Island, their entire distribution network was compromised and impacted on their support levels for the region."The team in Christchurch was amazing and in spite of great adversity and personal challenges. They rallied around each other and did a fantastic job keeping the operation running. Without their commitment, dedication and sheer bloody mindedness to keep going, the service impact to our customers would have been considerable,” says Whittaker.He tells IT Brief that their customers have been affected many ways. Some have had their buildings destroyed and their businesses effectively closed. Some of their larger customers were operational but unable to enter their premises and had to continue their operations from remote locations.Some customers lost huge amounts of business critical data which will never be recovered. Many businesses suffered a drop in demand for their products and services from the Christchurch region which will impact profits and jobs in the longer term. And some of their customers suffered personal tragedies which far outweigh the business impact.Paul Prouse, general manager for services and solutions, Fuji Xerox, says their customers have told them that these disasters have brought awareness to how important protection, archiving and fast and easy retrieval of documents is to a company's ongoing survival."These documents provide the lifeline required to continue to operate effectively both internally and externally with customers and if those documents are lost or jeopardised in any way, it can stop a business from operating. Protection and easy access to your information is now not only a requirement but a priority,” says Prouse."Digitising your documents has many benefits – and it’s the right thing to do. Any considerable amount of documents that are lost could cost a company millions to recover from and put a huge dent in productivity.”Prouse suggests another important consideration is retrieval. Many of their customers scan and archive their documents, but they focus less on what is the easiest way for their employees to access this information in a simple and cost effective manner. Retrieval of documents from offsite storage can be expensive so having a plan in place for retrieval is just as important as the scanning itself."My recommendation is to work with a document expert and gain advice and support on the right way to digitise, host and retrieve your documents for your business; not only today but in the future,” says Prouse.Two earthquakes to learn
Another example of a company, which was kept busy in the wake of the earthquakes, is Digiweb. This Christchurch-based company has been operating since 1997 as one of the early New Zealand hosting providers. It has two data center facilities in Christchurch 10 kilometres apart and one in Auckland. More than 15,000 customers are using their data center, cloud computing, domain name management and payment gateway solutions."We did not experience any downtime during the earthquakes, even though one of the data centers was affected. Due to SAN replication of the servers from one location to another, no data was lost. The system is set to automatically reboot at the other facility, if one of the data centers is affected,” says Adrian Grant, managing director, Digiweb.He says every one of their clients, who use the high availability service, were kept running with no disruption. And this is a crucial factor."Customers don’t care if a server fails. They just want uptime for their business,” he says.On the day of the earthquake the company had to look after its staff, who needed to catch up with family. So from 2pm to 4pm staff went home. But Grant says that by 4pm people started coming back to work, and they kept working as much as required."We were operating around the clock for days, thanks to our dedicated staff.”Grant thinks that many companies took two earthquakes to learn how to protect their data, but it is now a lesson well learned."While disaster recovery solutions used to be really hard to sell, it is now a popular request from customers.”Digiweb has developed a comprehensive disaster recovery manual, which is updated every month with essential information and instructions to get the company through any crisis. All key staff have a copy of the manual, which must be kept off-site, so it can be retrieved if the building can’t be accessed.Based on his experience from handling the disasters, Grant has these recommendations for companies:
- In a disaster, paper counts. Don’t rely purely on electronic disaster recovery documents to get you through. In Christchurch many of our staff lost power for several days. Whilst our data centers were fully powered, our key staff who were off-premise lost power. There was no substitute for paper based DR records.
- PSTN networks will fail or be overloaded. Use IP based services to communicate with staff, key accounts and suppliers (i.e. Skype, Twitter). They are more likely to remain in operation.
- Understand the price of failure. What is the cost to your business of losing mission critical systems? The cost of good DR systems is immaterial against the cost of losing your on-line channel to market.
