A few weeks ago, Superstorm Sandy ravaged the East Coast, leaving devastation in its wake. Thousands of people were without power, food, and water. It quickly became clear that Sandy’s aftermath would bring life on the East Coast to a standstill for days as the region began to rebuild.

Early estimates of the damage put the business loss associated with the storm as high as $30 billion. But Grudi Associates, The John M. Glover Agency, and many others weren’t a part of that group. Evolve IP’s redundant cloud platform allowed them to run their businesses remotely as the storm raged on.

For example, InformationWeek Cloud picked up the story of how we helped Apria Health Care stay functional during the storm so that they could continue to provide their vital health services to customers in the days after the storm. Thanks to Evolve IP, Apria was able to deliver essential products to each customer, the most important being the personal oxygen tank.

They weren’t the only ones to escape downtime. After the storm passed, we took a look at our numbers and found that our customers logged into the OSSmosis portal 5,145 times — a record-breaking number for us. We spoke with one of our customers that used the portal, Colonial Electric Supply, and it reported that even during the storm, it still had clients needing their services. Evolve IP helped the company stay available for these customers the entire time.

Unfortunately, most businesses weren’t as lucky. Scott Kinka sat down with Computerworld on Nov. 8 to help assess the technical damage caused by Sandy and offered advice on avoiding future disasters by storing servers correctly.

DISASTER AVOIDANCE: Scott Kinka tells Computerworld readers how to correctly preserve servers

Hurricane Sandy has undoubtedly brought business continuity to the forefront for many organizations. But as Grudi Associates, Colonial Electric Supply, The John M. Glover Agency, and many others have seen, Evolve IP focuses on disaster avoidance, not disaster recovery. During Sandy, this approach helped us keep our customers up and running, and their employees working safely from home.

What challenges did your IT department face during Sandy? Tell us in a comment below.