Monday (Presidents Day) started with a phone call informing me the building that housed the Department of Insurance was on fire. The initial focus for an IT team during a business continuity event is restoration of IT infrastructure. My preliminary thoughts went to our recently completed consolidation effort which safeguarded the technology during the event. Through the utilization of off-premise servers, both the server hardware and software for Insurance are located in our consolidated data centers, outside of the building that was affected. Consolidation significantly-minimized our obligation in the recovery of the day-to-day IT systems that affect regular business operations, personal computers, printers, access to two national databases, data and voice connectivity.
Monday evening the OCIO Network team extended the Department of Insurance network to a new location in the Nebraska State Office Building, and then the Wide Area Network (WAN) team confirmed that the network was operational. The Imaging team (created via consolidation) ensured we could obtain and image enough inventory of laptops to meet the business requirements provided by Insurance. The Voice team placed an order to move all phone numbers to the newly designated workspace.
The recently created Site Support team came in Monday evening and imaged Laptops, and they were on-site first thing Tuesday morning to ensure staff were able to log in. It was truly a group effort with former associates from NDOT, DHHS and OCIO working together to ensure business as usual for Insurance on Tuesday…or as close to it as possible.
Our next focus was to ensure that the Insurance employees were prepared to communicate with citizens and employees of the State without interruption by 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday.
Representatives from the following teams were at the new location early Tuesday morning:
- WAN team
- Local Area Network (LAN) team
- Site Support
- Cabling Services Team
- Voice team
On standby, our Service Desk remained at the home office and meanwhile prepared for a surge of incoming calls to reset passwords and assist with mapping drives.
I want to share a couple of notes sent to me on Tuesday:
“It was SOOOO nice to see all of the PC’s set up and ready and everything working by 7:40 AM”
“Not confident this is something we could have pulled off this quickly and successfully prior to the consolidation”
“Ed – You owe us another President’s Day”
As always, I (and especially your colleagues and customers at the Department of Insurance) appreciate your efforts to provide quality service to the State and the Citizens of Nebraska!
Ed
