Five Months Later, Local Businessman Discusses what Sandy taught about Preparedness

BY MICHAEL RICONDA

Pearl River – In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Pearl River-based Superior Technology Solutions offered a service to clients which helped ensured their financial survival. With President John Luludis at the helm, Superior offered services to allow the continued function of digital systems, reflecting the importance of  business continuity.

Luludis’ company offers contingency plans which are  custom-built  and designed to cover as many potential problems as possible.  Working with clients as varied as steamship companies and hospitality services, his company has proven to be an asset to any group wishing to stay afloat.

Superior’s business has responded to customer and market demands  over the past four years it has been active, expanding into application development for everyday operations, e-based financial transactions and cloud computing.

The discipline of continuity has always had steady attention from all sectors and particularly larger organizations and the financial industry, with renewed attention after Sandy. Though the attention has returned to almost pre-Sandy levels, Luludis hoped it would remain long enough for businesses to learn from past mistakes and make necessary updates to their existing plans.

“The older the memory gets, the less motivation you have to move forward,” Luludis explained.

During Sandy, Luludis and his employees worked hard to track the storm’s progress, estimate its arrival time and review their own preparations and emergency generator. They also took pains to make personnel arrangements so employees could monitor and aid Superior’s Pearl River networks, connections, and remote client sites throughout the storm and the days following.

“We knew we were going to have a lot of damage at the customer locations themselves,” Luludis explained. “We did, and we had to make sure we had resources in place to help them begin to recover.”

According to Luludis, customers managed from their Pearl River data center and remote sites further from the storm were almost completely unaffected, though remote applications at business sites, which sometimes required replacement or even the physical “rescue” of equipment from the waters.

Strategic continuity planning  often means the difference between survival and devastation. Luludis explained that in his business, he had seen and heard many instances of severe losses which could have easily been prevented by contingency plans, including losses from which businesses were unable to recover.

“You never know what the end results are going to be of any particular disaster,” Luludis said. “If you’re not prepared to understand what that is, you put your business at risk.”

  john luludis, superior