A hurricane is, thankfully, not an everyday occurrence. And during a hurricane, even our most reliable resources are stretched and even broken. During Hurricane Sandy this week, subway tunnels flooded, people lost power, and businesses and branches of government shut their doors.

But as much as we rely upon institutions such as power companies and public transportation, we have come to rely even more on data centers, as we move more and more information and services to the cloud. That is why data center providers like the appropriately named Windstream (News - Alert) plan ahead for worst-case scenarios.

And all of that preparation paid off this week, as Windstream was able to weather the storm – quite literally.

While the states of New York and New Jersey were the hardest hit, nearby states, like Connecticut and Pennsylvania, were affected as well. Thus, Windstream, which has a data center in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, knew it had to be ready for this potential “storm of the century.” It knew that companies were relying on these data centers to ensure business continuity, and Windstream was ready to serve its customers.

Image via Shutterstock

Windstream’s customers contacted the data center provider, needing to access the crucial data they had colocated with Windstream. Fortunately, it was up and ready to go, and companies in the New York and New Jersey area could breathe a sigh of relief.

“Our customers operate their infrastructure from our site every day; we just delivered the same service we provided last week and the month before that,” said one Windstream data center manager.

In order to ensure the safety of customer data, Windstream took every precaution to secure its data centers. The data centers are audited under SSAE 16 SOC 1 Type II standards every year. They have raised floors, onsite auxiliary generators, and use N+1 configurations for power and cooling. Should they lose power, they have redundant systems ready to go, providing uptime of 99.995 percent.

It’s nice to know that even if the postal service needs to take a day off to ensure the safety of mail carriers, companies like Windstream are ready to step in to make sure that our e-mail is as accessible – or moreso – than our snail mail.