Lending Provider Reinvents Disaster Recovery with Microsoft Azure
Overview
In April 2011, a $30 billion lending institution in Columbia, South Carolina, faced an unexpected catastrophe when a water main break flooded the basement of its building. Over 1,200 servers were physically unharmed but rendered unusable due to the destruction of the building’s entire electrical distribution system. With no power—commercial or backup—the data center was effectively dead.
eGroup | Enabling Technologies received a call at 12:45 a.m. on that Saturday morning. By Sunday afternoon, they had mobilized a full recovery response, deploying a portable data center rack pre-configured for workload restoration at a colocation site in Alpharetta, Georgia.
Though the client had believed they were prepared, the incident revealed that being “ready” is not the same as being resilient. Recovery took years and cost millions.
This story became a foundational case for rethinking IT Disaster Preparedness in the age of cloud and virtualization.
Challenge
While businesses often believe they are protected by having backups or basic disaster recovery plans, most:
Rely on point-in-time backups that are rarely tested.
Cannot confidently answer how long a system restore will take.
Lack familiarity with the step-by-step execution of recovery procedures.
Underestimate the compound impact of small, benign failures leading to large-scale outages.
The lending provider had no physical damage to their servers—but because their electrical infrastructure was submerged, they had no way to bring those servers back online. Their assumption of preparedness was based on traditional DR models that didn’t account for edge-case failures.
“Things that have never happened before happen every day.”
— Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival
Solution
eGroup Enabling Technologies responded rapidly with a fully equipped, portable data center rack and got systems online in under 48 hours. But that event sparked an even more important evolution: the mindset shift from disaster recovery to IT Resilience.
eGroup advocates for a proactive approach to disaster preparedness by:
Practicing routine failovers (like a local Federal Credit Union client does)
Automating and standardizing DR processes
Shifting DR from an afterthought to a core business requirement
Today, eGroup delivers fast, flexible, and affordable IT Resilience solutions powered by:
Microsoft Azure for globally accessible, secure cloud infrastructure
Zerto for replication and orchestration, delivering RPOs in seconds and RTOs in minutes
Seamless failover across private and public cloud environments
Bi-directional journaling with up to 30 days of change history
The result is a simplified, cloud-enabled DR strategy that supports regulatory compliance, continuous availability, and business continuity—even in the most unexpected scenarios.
Why eGroup
eGroup Enabling Technologies brings:
Deep disaster recovery experience across small and enterprise clients
Proven methodologies shaped by real-world recovery events
A partner mindset focused on speed, simplicity, and certainty
Access to cutting-edge DR tools like Microsoft Azure and Zerto
Cloud expertise to replace brittle, patchy infrastructure with scalable resilience
eGroup helps organizations shift from reactive recovery to proactive readiness. Whether it’s responding to emergencies or architecting modern DR solutions, eGroup ensures you’re prepared—not just for what you expect, but for what you can’t.
eGroup Can Help You Too!
Explore Our IT Resilience & Disaster Recovery Solutions and discover how we help you turn downtime risk into operational confidence.
