Alpha Omega Education is a tutoring institute that helps students in Sydney achieve their academic potential; by providing weekly classes and a range of workshops for all levels of education. Since opening in 1990, Alpha Omega Education has been hugely successful and now operates from four locations around Sydney.

The Project

Alpha Omega Education’s main office faced a major business disaster after a storm that covered Sydney with strong winds and rain flooded their building’s basement creating a complete power blackout to all tenancies in the five level building for more than 5 days. With no electricity in the building; all the physical and virtual servers were offline and approximately 50 staff members were unable to access critical information in order to continue operations. Furthermore, as the organisation’s four Sydney locations relied on access to the servers that were affected by the storm; the first priority for Alpha Omega was to establish an alternate remote work environment where employees had access to company files and emails. Another priority was to set up a VoIP service that would enable employees to make and receive business phone about class timetables and schedules.

Empower IT Solutions quickly and efficiently executed the comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) plan; to minimise downtime for sales and operation staff within the organisation. As part of the disaster recovery plan; Private Cloud services for server infrastructure and the VoIP phone system for business continuity were activated. Company staff were thus able to seamlessly communicate with their clients throughout the disaster period without significant downtime to operations.

The benefits experienced by Alpha Omega

Empower IT Solution’s prompt and highly responsive infrastructure team stepped in to execute the server restoration procedure onto their private cloud environment. Also by restoring the servers to a Disaster Recovery site, the team at Empower IT Solutions were able to have all the servers and the phone system online within 2 hours. The administrative staff members were then re-located to the various offices around Sydney and continued their day-to-day work by using laptops, tablets and temporary workstations.

Customer communication is imperative for an organisation like Alpha Omega Education. Staff members were able to make phone calls to all clients to inform them of changes in timetables and classes due to the shutdown of the main campus. Staff were also able to access their email and CRM which allowed business operations to continue as normal.

By engaging with Empower IT team Alpha Omega was able to:

• Set up an alternate remote office to service clients while the services at their main office was restored
• Enable their employees to almost instantaneously notify clients about the changes to timetable and class schedules
• Provide staff access emails and CRM data to perform normal day-to-day business operations
• Implement a comprehensive and effective disaster recovery plan
• Maintain high level of customer service

In the digital age it is highly likely that the next disaster is right around the corner. Do not wait until you are affected to take action. Implement a tried and tested disaster recovery and business continuity strategy and continue operating your business without any disruption. Contact the Empower IT Solutions team for more details.