CEDAR FALLS - Mark Kittrell sees his firm, Team Technologies Inc., in much the same light as an insurance company.

"You hope you never need us," said Kittrell, vice president of business development for the data-management organization.

But when the Cedar River started sloshing over its banks and sending people fleeing from their homes and businesses across the region, there were a few companies providing essential services that likely were thankful for Kittrell's organization.

Team Technologies, which owns and manages a data center in Cedar Falls, provided expertise - and, in some cases, sanctuary - for hospitals, a local utility company, telephone systems and even cable-television service that were able to continue to function through the chaos that was the Flood of '08.

"The good news is we're well up on the hill in the industrial park, and we didn't have any problems with water," Kittrell said, referring to Team Technologies' Prairie Lakes Data Center in the Cedar Falls Technology Park. "The challenges we ran into very quickly were more related to how we could keep our center going."

They did, and, as a result, the onslaught from the Cedar River threatened, but did not breach, storage and connectivity for a number of basic service operations.

"We spent about 24 hours very much in communications with those folks, making sure power stayed on and cable stayed going," Kittrell said. "Thank goodness we were able to work our way from that."

Key to Team Technologies' success in helping organizations like Cedar Falls Utilities and the Iowa Health System through the crisis was prior planning.

"We choose our sites with safeguards against disasters, including floods, in mind," Kittrell said, adding that the company's centers were running throughout the flood crisis.

CFU kept running, even though the municipal utility took on 6 feet of water on its first floor.

"We were fortunate that our system was designed so that we can lose some critical components to keep operational during the flood," said Steve Bernard, CFU's customer service director. "Fortunately, all our servers were on the second floor."

As of July 8, the utility still had 200 people working out of Team Technologies' campus, Bernard said.

"We had to find office space with Internet and phone connectivity immediately," he said. "Team was a location we had identified in our disaster recovery plan for moving a portion of our location."

CFU will continue to have a presence at Team Technologies' plant while the utility rebuilds its own building's first floor, which the flood swamped.

"The first floor has to be completely gutted," Bernard said. "We're actually still in parts of two Team buildings and probably will be for at least another six months."

CFU also had arrangements with Hawkeye Community College and Involta, another Cedar Falls-based data-management center, as part of its storm-emergency plan.

"It was very valuable to have that plan, especially in getting our business office up and running," Bernard said. "We had prearranged with these groups to be able to move employees quickly and computers and phones, as well, to basically get us back up and running for basically a 30-day plan."

Having employees working out of Team Technologies' complex enabled CFU to field inquiries from customers, Bernard said.

""We were fortunate that they had some extra room there and, for 24 hours, we worked very well with their folks to help them engineer their way through the community's problems," he said.

Iowa Health, which operates 11 hospitals and 135 clinics across the state, stored some of its critical data in a building in downtown Cedar Rapids, but also duplicate data stored at Team Technologies, said Jim Mormann, vice president and chief information officer at Iowa Health.

"We called Team when we knew our building in Cedar Rapids was going to flood," Mormann said. "We moved 130 servers from the basement of our office in downtown Cedar Rapids to the Team data center in Cedar Falls. It was quite the effort, but our servers were running again within 12 hours thanks to the staff at Team."

Mormann said the servers moved to Cedar Falls stored data directly related to patient care.

"Because of the expertise and quick work of the Team Technologies staff, we were able to continue to serve patients across the state," he said. "The staff did a fabulous job, and we used them heavily to get through this disaster. Their quick work minimized the impact of the flood on our patients."

Kittrell said the experience brought two important lessons.

The first, he said, is that companies should not store important computer equipment or data in basements or other areas that are susceptible to flooding.

"There's a ton of people in downtown Cedar Falls and Waterloo who have computer systems in their basement, and it doesn't make sense if it's going to fill up with water," he said. "While they're rebuilding, I'd emphasize they ought to look at that and get that stuff moved."

The other lesson is that companies should have redundancy built into their data-management systems.

"Stuff that your business can't run without, whether it's an e-mail server or telephone system, get it to an off-site place like ours or make sure you have redundant telecom systems coming into it," he said. "If you lose your Qwest connection or Mediacom connection, you could be down for a long time, maybe weeks."

It's easy to get lulled into a false sense of security, particularly in the Midwest, Kittrell said.

"We don't really in general have a lot of hurricanes or terrorist problems or burglaries, but if you have an F-5 tornado and flood, you have to have business recovery plans in place."

Contact Jim Offner at (319) 291-1598 or jim.offner@wcfcourier.com