We’ve been talking a lot lately about the wireless option for business continuity and disaster recovery, and nothing proves the point better than a successful example of a company putting this to work. Especially when there are warm, cuddly puppies and kitties involved.
The company is PETCO Animal Supplies, with more than 1,000 stores nationwide. PETCO was mentioned in passing in our recent wireless business continuity webinar, but the company’s story deserves a closer look.
Like most every enterprise in the past few years, PETCO was looking to hold its costs down, and of course saw IT as one of the areas where that could be accomplished. It assessed how much it was paying to keep backup circuits (in this case analog modem lines) available for its distribution and retail locations, and wondered if there wasn’t a better and more cost-effective approach.
Beyond the cost considerations, what was happening was when primary T1 communications links went down, some of the IT systems simply wouldn’t operate on dial backup. Other processes were able to continue operation, but with degraded performance that took a serious bite out of productivity and customer service.
To make a long story short, PETCO decided to dump its backup landlines in favor of EV-DO data services from Sprint. The solution was deployed company-wide in just three months, with Sprint handling all the testing, staging, installation, and everything else necessary to get the company on the air with wireless backup.
The new strategy has accomplished PETCO’s objective, cutting costs by enabling the company to eliminate the need for a backup line at every location. Productivity is improved, because when there is a communications outage, each location has full functionality for the entire time it operates via the wireless backup.
So while “wireless business continuity” may be a bit of an abstract concept, PETCO’s experience shows how this works in the real world. We have the full case study, cleverly titled “Sprint helps PETCO put a leash on technology costs,” available for download, if you’d like to have a look at it.
