Power out, firms rely upon offsite backup

After the full brunt of last week's storm was realized, Hospice Buffalo knew it would have to cancel its Harvest Festival fundraiser Friday night. But without power at its Cheektowaga campus, staffers had no way of posting a notice on the nonprofit's Web site.

However, because the organization houses its computer servers off-site at 360PSG's data center in Amherst, a quick phone call was all it took to post an online notice about the cancellation.

Despite having no power for the week, dozens of area businesses left without electricity from last week's storm were able to keep going by taking advantage of technology firms that provide co-location and business continuity services.

Joel Colombo, managing partner at 360PSG, said his staffers are all working from home with laptops, cell phones and portable flash drives, giving them the ability to keep their clients up and running.

The company's data center, housed in a diesel-powered co-location facility owned by Level Three Communications, has not missed a beat, despite nearly everything around it losing power.

The same was true for dozens of its local customers, including a Lockport client that lost power but whose remote offices around the country never lost their intranet and other online services.

"When their main office goes down, none of the others do," Colombo said. "Most of our other clients from around the country didn't even know there was an interruption. They haven't even seen a hiccup in their data service."