While other companies scramble to batten the hatches ahead of hurricane season, Limbach Holdings, Inc. breezes through preparations. “We have completely migrated to the cloud. We are fully prepared for hurricanes and any other type of disruptive event,” explains Christos Ruci, CIO for Limbach.
Limbach’s approach to hurricane preparedness blends technology, planning, and a people-first focus on safety. It’s a far cry from the days when disaster preparation meant installing plastic sheeting over servers, carting reams of backup tapes off premises, and scrambling to keep electrical systems and backup generators operating during a storm.
The company, headquartered in Warrendale, Pennsylvania, and with 20 offices spread across the Upper Midwest, East Coast, and Florida, focuses on designing, installing, and maintaining complex HVAC, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. “Twenty years ago, when I started my career, it was a completely different situation,” Ruci says. “A cloud-first framework changes everything.”
Winds of Change
Limbach operates on two fronts to avoid disruptions during hurricane season. First, it focuses on operational resilience — both internally and for its clients, which include hospitals, research labs, data centers, and other organizations delivering essential services. Second, it prioritizes communication, collaboration, and safety across a distributed workforce of more than 1,400 employees.
The 120-year-old company, listed on NASDAQ with 2024 revenues of $518.8 million, relies on public cloud services from multiple providers to manage systems, applications and data. “There are no servers on premises. There is no need to scramble when a storm hits. Hurricane preparedness and disaster recovery extends across the business framework,” Ruci explains.
Limbach’s disaster recovery framework includes daily and hourly backups based on system criticality, multi-region and multi-cloud requirements, and five layers of communication redundancy. The company has decoupled critical systems, and it backs them up across multiple cloud providers and geographic regions. As a result, Ruci doesn’t have to worry about a single point of failure.
At the same time, the firm has also developed a strategy for keeping employees safe and productive during storm-related disruptions. With a mobile-enabled workforce, operations can continue seamlessly. When a storm arrives, there’s no mass messaging. Instead, Limbach relies on mobile apps, alerts, notifications, text messages, and conference bridges. Communication is based on location, role, and context. If an employee is unresponsive, the company can detect the problem and follow up individually.
It’s a winning strategy. “During a storm or any other type of disruption, we don’t have to think about our servers and IT infrastructure,” Ruci explains. “We can focus on keeping our operations running and keeping people safe.”
Tracking on Progress
Limbach’s migration to the cloud began in earnest in 2020, when Ruci joined the company and shifted its strategy away from on-site servers and data. He viewed a cloud-first architecture as a way to fortify and simplify business continuity while also supporting a hybrid workforce, addressing cybersecurity risks, and enabling rapid scaling during mergers and acquisitions. “Cloud gave us the scalability, resilience, and efficiency we now consider essential to operations,” Ruci explains.
Although Limbach’s focus on managed services increases up-front operational costs, it dials down long-term risks and lowers total cost of ownership, Ruci says. With hurricane seasons often delivering six to 10 major storms that present landfall threats, downtime is a thing of the past. “We’re built to stay online and keep operations functioning during a severe storm. Reliability and resilience have become a competitive advantage,” he adds.
A holistic, cloud-first mindset didn’t emerge overnight, however. Much of the expertise grew out of the pandemic — and a recognition that the company had to operate in a more decentralized way. “We understood that we had to elevate our IT framework and business strategy,” Ruci explains. While coping with all the issues arising from COVID-19, “We learned a lot about how to manage a hybrid workforce, use digital technology more effectively, and upgrade our internal thought processes.”
As Limbach shifted to a cloud-first approach, Ruci and other executives conducted a detailed analysis of workflows and mission-critical tasks. They examined how employees and customers access apps and data from the field, when and where staff required physical offices, and what conditions — such as power failures or surges — could impact people’s ability to work.
A significant technical hurdle involved modernizing the company’s identity management framework — a critical step in maintaining secure, seamless access to data. Although a lift-and-shift approach to cloud migration simplified the move to a cloud-first framework, it also introduced formidable challenges, including a need to ensure that employees and customers could access critical systems and data easily yet securely.
Avoiding analysis paralysis was critical. “Too often, when companies approach disaster recovery and business continuity planning, they become bogged down,” Ruci says. “We started with a safety-first approach aimed at blanket disaster recovery. If you have systems and people fully protected, dealing with a hurricane or any other potential disaster becomes second-nature.”
Calm During the Storm
The shift to a cloud-first architecture has transformed Limbach. A more strategic and integrated approach to disaster recovery and business continuity has fortified internal capabilities while boosting customer confidence. Today, “We’re able to communicate across the organization and ensure that we remain an indispensable business partner. We can keep critical systems running while prioritizing safety at every step,” Ruci says.
In an era of heightened climate risks, Ruci believes that the role of the CIO is evolving. It’s critical to reexamine systems and prepare for severe weather events and other possible disruptions. “A CIO must focus on more than selecting and managing IT infrastructure,” he observes. “Today, it’s all about business resilience. It’s essential to work side-by-side with HR, operations, and safety directors to protect people and keep business operations running.”
While technology has advanced dramatically, the threat of hurricanes hasn’t gone away. “Twenty years ago, prepping for a hurricane meant wrapping computers in plastic and taking home backup tapes,” Ruci recalls. “Now, it’s a manageable event. We’re cloud-native, fully mobile, and have systems that back up data across multiple regions. When a storm arrives, I’m not thinking about servers. I’m thinking about our people, their families, our customers, and how we keep everyone safe.”
