Hurricane Irma Aftermath: Tech Data Restores Business Systems
Tech Data (TECD) has fully restored its IT and business systems, the distributor said today. Hurricane Irma had triggered major network and e-commerce outages at the Florida-based company. While it’s too soon to assess the outage’s potential financial impact, Tech Data expects it to be minimal.
“Tech Data is fully operational,” according to Brian Kosoy, a spokesperson for the company. “Our Clearwater headquarters (and all of our locations) are open for business as usual.”
That’s good news for the distributor and its ecosystem of IT vendors and channel partners. Earlier in the week Tech Data suffered network connectivity issues in the United states “due to the widespread power and communication utility outages in the state of Florida,” the company said at the time.
Tech Data temporarily closed its Clearwater and Miami offices, and eBusiness systems for U.S. customers had been down. All of those systems are now fully restored.
While it’s too soon to assess what the financial impact will be, Tech Data expects it to be minimal. The reasoning: Hurricane Irma and its impact were largely contained to Florida in the United States. Two-thirds of the company’s global footprint (Europe and APAC) were operating business as usual, and Tech Data’s legacy TS business in the Americas was also transacting, Kosoy noted.
There’s this thing called the Cloud that Tech Data has been pushing. It’s really handy for making sure a tropical storm doesn’t take out your $10 million/day website.
It was surprising to learn they do not use the cloud or have geographical redundancy in the U.S. and disheartening for a company that size. Even as a small MSP, their outrage affected us though it helped their competitor a bit.
Andrew, Jeff: It wasn’t Tech Data’s finest moment, I concede. Reinforces the fact that you can be a great business 99.9% of the time, but that 00.1% hiccup can really rattle partners and customers.
-jp