Prevent Disaster
– Stefan Pittinger, Vice President & General Manager of Peak 10’s South Florida operations, says:
In South Florida, severe weather is just one of the things that can shut down IT operations, potentially costing thousands of dollars, untold man hours, and a damaged reputation with fans and the community for the Florida Panthers, Fort Lauderdale’s professional ice hockey team.
Since inception, the Panthers managed its own IT infrastructure, manually backing up its data and storing it in-house. Because the Panthers’ IT environment and stored data were located at the same site, if its location were to experience a significant malady, all would be lost, causing the organization to lose all operational data. Its website, data from online ticket sales, and season ticket holder information would all be lost. The Panthers needed a reliable, offsite solution that would allow it to maintain operations even if its current data center were offline, where they could failover seamlessly. It also needed a solution that wouldn’t require a large capital outlay.
After researching possible data center providers, the Panthers chose Peak 10 for its consultative managed approach, geographic diversity and array of cost-effective cloud solutions. With Peak 10’s Recovery Cloud, the Panthers receive response and recovery in near-real time. The Panthers can select the point in time at which a test or failover occurs at the time of execution. Should a disaster strike, they can test or failover to a point in time before the malady occurred. In the event that the Panthers declare to failover, Peak 10’s 24x7x365 staff is trained to initiate the failover process. Peak 10 will also assist with other aspects of the disaster recovery plan including updating public domain name system (DNS) records hosted by Peak 10. This not only safeguards the Panthers’ data, but offers them a seamless cloud solution to maintain their operations.
Peak 10’s cloud infrastructure is also PCI compliant, meaning that the Panthers’ IT infrastructure meets the federal regulatory compliance requirements for organizations that process or store credit card data. Peak 10 manages all aspects of the underlying technology, including maintenance and providing the associated data center services, hypervisor and Windows operating system licenses.
Peak 10 simplified what would have been a complicated, time-intensive and expensive IT solution for the Panthers to implement themselves. The Panthers would have needed to spend significantly up front in order to implement a similar solution on their own, and it would require significant manpower to maintain.
“We’ll never know the extent of the financial damage we would have eventually incurred by continuing to maintain our IT infrastructure and data storage onsite,” said Michael R. Yormark, Panthers president and CEO. “We are just thankful that we found the right partner and have a solution that brings our organization a peace of mind, for the fraction of the cost we would have spent to do it on our own.”
