Red River keeps on rolling…There’s a lot going on around the world this week – wars, tourists in space, North Korean rockets, Bear Market bounces, greed grief, and, of course, weather.
But here in the Upper Midwest there’s really only one story – the Red River of the North.
The Red’s unconventional in that it flows north, ultimately to Hudson Bay, which means it’s melting & wants to flow out before there’s anywhere for it all to go. This flood’s unprecedented – more water earlier in the year than there’s ever been before. You can prepare but you can’t really practice for a flood of these proportions. Disaster recovery planning is essential, but for an incident like this it is really hard to dry run – pun intended.
(Warning…bad segue approaching)
Fortunately, when it comes to testing your communication and contact center solutions, there really is a way to practice or to dry run that disaster or business disruption response. Around good ol’ IQ Services, business continuity and disaster recovery testing is an every day event. It is what we do. We make sure communication and contact center solutions work the way they are supposed to despite routine maintenance, accidentally pulled plugs and -- worse yet -- lightning strikes and hurricanes.
This week one of the newest members of our IQ Services family is “up nort” helping his family and others weather the storm. He is busy making sandwiches and moving special belongings to higher ground. He says things have calmed down a bit for the moment. Blizzard like weather is still in the forecast. Even when the threat is over this year, there is still next year. There will be more floods, blizzards, and tornadoes; more pulled plugs and bad cards. We’ll just keep doing our thing. The people of the Dakotas and Minnesota will keep moving, keep helping each other. The Red River will keep rolling…
Mike Burke
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423
Thought I would make a comment about this blog since I was the one that was there during the flood. The picture was taken about a ½ mile South of Grand Forks. It was so good to see everyone coming together to try save as much as possible. Mother Nature is a force to be reckoned with, especially the Red River of the North.
ReplyDeleteThere was a lot of destruction but in the wake of all that destruction you could see in people’s eyes that they would not lie down and give up. North Dakotans are a proud hard working bunch of people that always prevail because of their work ethic. If something is not going right, they work harder.
Thanks for writing this Mike, I like how you tied this in to disaster recovery. I think the over all theme to this is to always have a plan, be it in your business or that of natural disaster. Nice!