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To our valued REALTOR® Associations and their Members:
As you probably know SentriLock has been at the mercy of one of the worst disasters to affect our region in 100 years. While the news media has focused on Ike's effect in the Galveston / Houston area, the Ohio Valley was hit with hurricane force winds for a period of 7 hours on Sunday. The effect on the utility infrastructure over a 3,000 square mile area has been unprecedented. Over 125,000 utility customers are still without power 5 days after the storm hit.
I know many questions have arisen relating to backup systems and why this or that did not happen. Let me summarize what did happen. SentriLock maintains off-site redundant systems for power, network connectivity and server systems. During the extreme events that occurred on Sunday, each of these system did work as designed. Over 9,200 people renewed their SentriCard on Monday from our backup systems out of a normal Monday volume of 13,000. Those that were blocked were receiving connection failures upstream from our provider or are running on an older version of the Card Utility that does not support re-routing to backup servers. The sheer scope and area of the damage rendered our best efforts disaster plans not good enough for what mother nature did to us last Sunday.
I'd like to thank the employees at SentriLock for doing all they could to react professionally and not be deterred from finding solutions. I'd like to single out a few of the many deeds that were performed on behalf of the Company as our customers should see the dedication of our staff during this situation:
* Staffing the call center while buildings around us were ripped apart by high winds
* Finding a portable generator and deploying it at our ISP's remote fiber optic repeater station as well as maintaining a rotating shift to drive out and re-fuel it
* Staying focused while their families endured hardships of gasoline shortages, property damage, water disruption and no electricity
* Many late nights monitoring and correcting issues that came up as well as constantly adapting to conditions to keep service running
As we have now had the opportunity to learn from this disaster and improve our backup plans, SentriLock will be making the following additions to its disaster recovery options:
1. Establishing a 3rd set of backup systems co-located close to the Internet backbone in the western part of the US e.g. Salt Lake City, Denver or Phoenix. Most of our connectivity problems were upstream ISP issues with routes that were down. An additional set of back up servers in the west will improve availability of service if there are problems in the mid-west.
2. Install a second CARS voice response system at the western location to provide voice and automated response systems and phone based card renewals.
3. Coordinated improvements with our local data and voice transport providers. Again, many of our connectivity problems were NOT in our equipment or backup electrical systems, rather provider issues that quite frankly surprised us with the provider's lack of backup preparedness.
4. Further diversification of network and voice services.
5. Force user's on older card utility software to use the newer version which has supports fail-over to alternate sites. Our support staff is working on a program to make sure users of the old software upgrade to the version that has automated fail-over built in. If a customer installed their software before 1/1/2007 an upgrade is necessary to enable fail-over.
6. Update our association emergency notification list. This effort will be spearheaded by our account representatives to better maintain the emergency notification database so we can improve communication with associations in the event of a service disruption.
These improvements will be implemented over the next 60 days.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Scott Fisher
President/CEO
SentriLock LLC
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