Digital Edge Through the Years: Storms, Uptime and Community

How Digital Edge kept clients online through Hurricane Sandy, blizzards and hurricanes from 2012 to 2016, and the community work of the same years.

Long before cloud regions and AI-driven monitoring, Digital Edge built its reputation on a simple promise: when the weather turns, our clients stay online. This page brings together the short notices we published to clients between 2012 and 2016, and what they show about how we work.

Hurricane Sandy, 2012

When Sandy reached the East Coast in October 2012, Digital Edge doubled its 24-hour support staff before landfall. With wind gusts near 90 mph and days of rain, all five East Coast data center operations we managed ran with zero downtime. Sites that lost commercial power switched to generators, and diesel for three or more days was delivered in advance (Hurricane Sandy update, storm tracking notice).

The lessons we drew afterwards, including keeping infrastructure in professional data centers rather than offices and planning for staff who cannot work from home during regional outages, are in Hurricane Sandy: were you ready?

Blizzards and hurricanes, 2015 and 2016

For the January 2015 blizzard, Hurricane Joaquin in the fall of 2015 and Winter Storm Jonas in January 2016, we sent the same message to clients: technicians on site around the clock, facilities staffed 24×7 until the storm passed, and the option to move workloads on our geographical cluster to our Dallas data center (January 2015 advisory, status update, Hurricane Joaquin, Winter Storm Jonas).

Status reports covered what clients needed to know: commercial power, generator readiness, diesel levels (90% during the January 2015 storm), cooling, telecommunications and local transportation. When a severe thunderstorm watch hit Dallas in March 2016, the same plan ran in reverse, with New York ready to take over (Dallas storm notice).

What has not changed

• Prepare before the event: fuel, staffing, tested generators and a clear way to fail over.
• Tell clients early and often, with facts rather than reassurance.
• Keep a second site ready. In 2015 it was Dallas; today it is just as often a region in AWS or Microsoft Azure.

Read how we plan and test recovery today on our backup and disaster recovery page, or check your own readiness with the free disaster recovery readiness check.

Community and events

The same years included work outside the data center. In 2007 Digital Edge launched a scholarship for young people with outstanding achievements in information technology, which NY1 News covered in 2008 (scholarship announcement, NY1 coverage). In December 2012 we hosted "Cost Cutting Strategies in a Shrinking Economy" with Telehouse America at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York (event notice), and in January 2014 we launched our Global Continuity Solution with free infrastructure reviews for the first 100 registrants (offer).