Kiwi firms stick together during Wellington quake

After the magnitude 6.8 earthquake that shook Wellington a fortnight ago, accounting firm Enable Business, like many other small businesses, were quite literally out on the street.

On Friday, their Woodward Street office building was condemned due to quake damage.

Director, Mark Greer, and his team of nine local staff were given 15 minutes to vacate, just enough time to collect their laptops, some personal belongings and their server which had shut itself off.

Fortunately for Greer and his team, Kiwi cloud computing firm, The Full Suite witnessed the building evacuation and touched base.

“We’d been talking with The Full Suite quite regularly over the last few months to discuss our file migration needs, we just hadn’t yet prioritised the move," Greer recalls.

"When suddenly the earthquake made the decision for us, there was a very welcome phone call from Andy and our hardware containing our 80,000 important documents was in their safe hands within 20 minutes."

With their staff unable to operate without their required files and urgent client work mounting, Enable’s cloud migration needed to be rapid and accurate, and given the emergency situation, without the luxury of planning and document analysis.

But while most migrations of this size can take 8-10 days including a lot of analysis and document reorganisation, the SuiteMoves tool uses removes the need to make decisions and automates the entire process.

Enable’s migration commenced on the Friday evening. On Monday morning the Enable Business team came into The Full Suite’s office for training on using their files with the SuiteFiles app.

By Monday lunchtime they were back up and running with their 80,000 files all in the cloud and ready to move to their new temporary premises at Xero.

“It’s these situations where small businesses tend to suffer more than most," says Callum McNeil, CTO, The Full Suite.

"Large enterprises should have plans, policies and resources in place for these types of situations, however small business rarely have the skills, resources or access to the tools they need.

“The Full Suite’s focus is on helping these businesses not only get to the cloud quickly and painlessly, but also to make it a great experience once they are there.”

For Greer, the quick return to business alleviated the impact of the quake, “As many companies in Christchurch and Wellington have no doubt encountered, the earthquakes can completely unsettle and paralyze your business.

"Having access to The Full Suite’s technology to have our files so quickly deployed to the Cloud allowed us to avoid serious financial strain and provide some normality for our displaced staff.

"Not to mention it’s really nice to see one Kiwi business helping another."

Do you have any stories about Kiwi businesses helping each other during the Wellington earthquakes? Tell us your thoughts below