Freestore Foodbank: Standardized Practices and Disaster Planning

If you haven't already, check out TechSoup's new Disaster Planning and Recovery Toolkit. In addition to our free book, The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery, you'll also find webinars, articles, and links to other information around the Internet. We think that this toolkit can be a great resource for organizations in times of health as well as those facing disasters.

A point that we emphasize throughout the book is that disaster planning isn't just a matter of being ready for a natural disaster. It's about rethinking the way your organization works and adopting technologies and procedures that emphasize flexibility and adaptability throughout your organization. An organization that's ready for a disaster is also ready for a new opportunity to expand its impact when a need arises.

I can't think of a story that better illustrates this concept than that of the Freestore Foodbank in Cincinnati, one of the winners of our Microsoft Show Your Impact contest.

Freestore Foodbank serves over 7000 individuals a month in the greater Cincinnati area, and those numbers double in November and December. Before undergoing a major overhaul of their tech infrastructure, the Foodbank’s multiple branches had a lot of trouble communicating and working together, both internally and externally. In making major infrastructural improvements and standardizing practices across all of their branches, the Foodbank was able to serve the community more swiftly; what's more, when one branch was struck by a natural disaster, the Foodbank was ready for it.

From Freestore Foodbank's Show Your Impact essay:

Our growth was previously hampered by our inability to communicate and share information over multiple sites on a reliable network using standardized software. The servers were old, the software was ancient, and no one had the same version of word processing or spreadsheet software. It was difficult to share files between sites let alone between computers, as well as send things out to donors, board members, or anyone asking for information. Our mail was hosted externally for the upper staff and through POP mail from our internet provider for the remaining the staff. Without a common desktop platform, working together was difficult and cumbersome. There were no backups because the DAT tape drive that was being used had quit working, and there were no monies to replace it. Through the Microsoft donation program at TechSoup, we have been able to purchase software that we would not have been able to afford otherwise, make a multi-year plan for network and desktop standardization, formulate a reliable backup plan, and find a way to protect ourselves from potential disasters, bring e-mail in-house, and work towards bringing stability and security to our organization.

We began with the implementation of updated server technology. A server was purchased for each site and new server operating software and licenses were purchased and loaded onto them. Having a common operating system helped to end some of the issues that were happening between sites which was a huge time savings for the 1.5 members of the IT staff. It allowed us to take advantage of Active Directory for the first time and control access to files, form policy groups, enforce policies, and helped us to secure some of the holes that were causing problems. From there, the standardization of the desktops began with the purchase of XP licenses and office licenses to bring us up to a level where we could share documents and not worry about what version or what program the document was created in. Productivity rose and fewer client files were delayed in reaching necessary desks as most of the paperwork is now available electronically. This is especially important now because we are seeing more than 200 clients daily.

One of the most critical purchases that we made was the Data Protection Manager (DPM) software for doing shadow copy/replica backups of our files. It allowed us to take our data and save it off-site by having each site have its own DPM server located at the opposite site. It also allowed our user base to recover different versions of documents if they were accidentally overwritten or deleted. This advantage became especially important during the September 2008 windstorms when our Liberty Street location was without power for four days. We were still able to be partially operational because the site’s data was protected at another location and was restorable to another server.