San Diego Wildfires: Business and Government Systems Keep Running Despite the Disaster
Business continuity plans helped Qualcomm and San Diego County keep going despite system overload, employee evacuations and other consequences of the fires.
Demand also initially overwhelmed the county’s “2-1-1” service, an emergency hotline for fire and related information, says Crowell. However, Crowell’s team was able to quickly scale the system up from handling 24 concurrent callers to taking 237 simultaneous calls. “Wait times are becoming reasonable again,” he says, noting that they had been as long as 15 to 20 minutes during the recent peak.
“The principal issue for IT is the ability to leverage up your capacities. You test your assumptions and you see what works and what didn’t. And we have done a fairly good job,” says Crowell, who notes that others, including AT&T and some ISPs, have also been initially overwhelmed by the public’s use of their infrastructure in the wake of the fires.
In a disaster, “everything get overwhelmed,” he says. “So everyone is facing the same issues.”
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