Rebate management blog - Page 16 - Enable

For many businesses, the question is not if a disaster or power outage could happen, but when it will occur? And how severe it will be? As a company whose primary products are internet-based applications, it is of vital importance to Enable that our ability to host our clients’ applications remains unaffected in every eventuality that could be reasonably foreseen. Disaster recovery (DR) is not something that any business can afford to get wrong. This is why Enable takes it very seriously and, after recent events, can boast of having first-hand experience.

Sometime around 03:00 on Monday, December 4th, a water heater in the roof space in our unit 11 building failed and began to leak. The water heater was located above the stairwell and leaked through the first floor, destroyed ceiling tiles, flooded one of the staff toilets, and made its way through to the ground floor. Unfortunately, significant water had entered our server room. The water had run through all three server cabinets and the servers within. All local servers, networks, and internet access shut down after power was lost. This meant no access to telephone, email or any local IT infrastructure including domains, web servers, file servers, source control and deployment services.

One of the main advantages of hosting in the cloud rather than locally, is that no live systems or data were affected, this meant minimal impact on our clients. Also, due to sensible management of time and resources, projects that we had underway were still delivered to clients on time.

Ewan Gibb is the IT Manager at Enable and has been with the company for over 15 years, helping it evolve into the well-organised and responsive IT department that it is today. Ewan was heavily involved with the DR process for this incident from the moment it was reported, ensuring that our systems were back online and operating normally as soon as possible. Here are Ewan’s recollections of how the day’s events unfolded.

For spring / early summer we have a series of three webinars planned to share more detail about our 3 step approach to profitable growth through: Mastering rebate accounting and maximising profit from rebate deals; Being prepared for and executing on smarter supplier negotiations; Collaborating with suppliers for mutually profitable growth. Throughout the series we will be providing examples for builders' merchants, plumbing, electrical and HVAC suppliers, buying groups, other wholesale...

In order to prepare for major negotiations with suppliers, businesses often have to extract historical data from multiple systems: buying groups need information from their members' systems, newly merged businesses need information from different parts of the group. We have seen cases where managing large volumes of transactions with (largely) manual processes, such as spreadsheets, can have a detrimental impact on profitability, cash flow, supplier relationships and ultimately the performance o...

UK Industry Leader Continues Rapid Expansion of North American Customer Base PRESS RELEASE: New York, NY and Stratford-upon-Avon, UK – February 6th, 2018 Enable, a global provider of collaborative rebate management software, today announced it has been selected by Wolseley Canada. Wolseley Canada joins other notable building materials distributors and buying groups on Enable’s rapidly growing North American client roster. As a leading wholesale distributor to plumbing, HVAC, waterworks and indus...

Enable has more than 15 years of experience in designing, securing, and maintaining hosting environments on which our bespoke software solutions depend. Increasingly, we are deploying solutions to Azure, Microsoft’s globally-available cloud hosting platform. This leaves our clients safe in the knowledge their software is not only maintained and developed by Enable’s highly skilled team of developers but is also hosted on a secure and powerful platform in the form of Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Azure is a popular cloud hosting service that offers a secure, modern hosting platform with powerful features, such as the automatic provisioning of additional processing power during periods of high demand and continuous security-health monitoring, available out of the box. With industry leading hosting supporting our applications, developers at Enable are free to focus on delivering reliable and highly engaging software solutions.