The wind howls at 150 miles per hour. Walls of water toss cars like beach toys. Millions of homes and businesses plunge into darkness. Nothing in nature delivers the atmospheric energy of a hurricane or the destructive potential of these cyclonic scourges.
Jutting into the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico with 1,350 miles of coastline, no other location in the US gets hit more often by hurricanes than the Florida peninsula. Since 1851, over 100 hurricanes have made landfall between Key West and Pensacola. During coming years, hurricanes could also become more devastating as the climate changes and sea levels rise.
In the aftermath of a series of hurricane-related outages and near-misses, City Furniture could no longer tolerate the risks that hurricanes posed to its South Florida business locations. As one of Florida’s largest retailers, City Furniture ran its own on-premises computing systems and stored vital customer data at local data centers. The IT management team was looking for a proven solution to back up critical data and support network resiliency, regardless of any weather threat.
At the same time, City Furniture recognized another opportunity. What if moving to a new, more reliable computing platform could also add more operational flexibility, with the capacity to handle greater workloads during sales events and seasonal surges?
“IBM has been a partner of ours for over 40 years, so we couldn’t think of a better partner that we’d like to go on the journey to cloud with,” explains Chad Simpson, Vice President and Deputy CIO of City Furniture. “They understand enterprise, they understand business-critical and we knew they would do whatever it took to make it a success.”