Helping Others Be Prepared

"Be prepared" is the motto of the boy scouts. Some ISPs are finding in this timeless childhood wisdom a way to help others and earn money doing so.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [October 2, 2003]

During a season of floods, hurricanes, and blackouts, it pays to be prepared. One ISP in Texas is charging well-heeled customers for the platinum plate of disaster planning specials.

"We're in Austin. Here in Austin we have no flooding, no hurricanes, and no tornados," explains Jonah Yokubaitis, CEO and co-founder of Texas.net. "Dallas has a tornado problem, and Houston is on the coast and has floods and hurricanes."

In those two cities there are customers willing to pay for the ultimate in disaster recovery, and Texas.net is building it.

"We build in close proximity to an airport and major freeways. In a disaster there can be problems with roads. Employees and fly in and not need to rent a car," says Yokubaitis.

He says that one site is within three miles of Austin's airport. The company is building a disaster recovery campus with five hotels and three restaurants on campus. "Employees can fly in, stay in the hotel, and walk to work or drive a golf cart," he says. Once there, the employees have workstations, a lounge area, conference rooms, desks, and even phones, so that they can keep doing their jobs.

Hurricanes are particularly easy to prepare for because they are forecast before they arrive. "Two days before the hurricane arrives the employees go from Houston to Austin," says Yokubaitis.

Having a backup in another city is important, he believes. "During 9-11," he notes, "businesses were not prepared for the way the dust jammed the air ducts and made data centers unusable."

Being in another city allows customers to avoid having to anticipate aspects of a disaster that cannot be anticipated. In other words, it's all about peace of mind.

The suburbs can sell
ANET Internet Solutions is a Chicago-based ISP, but it was founded in a suburb called Napierville. Although the company is pleased to have opened a new data center and corporate head office in the city, the suburban data center became more valuable recently.

"We do off site data storage," says Jeff Liggett, founder and CEO. "We found that our suburban data center became extremely popular after 9-11 as corporations suddenly wanted to have primary or backup servers out of downtown Chicago."

But more could be done
But ISPs are not capitalizing on all the opportunities available. This is like selling insurance. You're selling something people might need but often try to avoid buying.

The blackout in the northeast reminded those affected that a backup has to be far away from the main center of operations to avoid a local blackout, because local blackouts now affect half the nation.

There are three grids in the U.S. Roughly, they are East, West, and Texas (which means that ISPs in Texas should have a particularly valuable local advantage). Yet, Yokubaitis and Liggett tell us that companies are not yet trying to buy backups outside their electric grid.

Instead, whether it's Austin or Chicago, companies are looking for local data backup. Successful business webhosts have a real business opportunity here, a chance to forge alliances with businesses they don't compete against.

ISPs on opposite coasts could set up deals where each ISP's customer gets a backup on the opposite coast, or any ISP outside of Texas could team up with an ISP in Texas.

Other ideas seem obvious moneymakers. Why not offer flat-rate annual business continuity? This would be more than just disk space; it would include knowing the customer's business and making sure that the most important parts of that business' Web presence continue to function if there's a disaster. It could be as little (and as cheap) as having a single page held in reserve that can go up if the main website goes down, or it could be the complete replication of a company's office, as Yokubaitis offers.

Companies will pay to have a disaster plan in place. Helping a company build a disaster plan is a good deed and a profitable one, and it can be as simple or complex as the customer desires.

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