Restructuring the buildings of the highly secure data center CITA (Centrum für Informations-Technische Angelegenheiten, Center for Information Technology Issues) took about nine months, starting early 1994. At the same time, the fifteen employees allotted to this project developed the business model, procedures and methods, the agreements, marketing model, and everything else required.

Within only a few months, nearly ten major organizations recognized the opportunity to do something about disaster recovery plans for their companies’ IT, which was gaining importance. On 15 June 1995, the first disaster recovery test was carried out successfully. What followed was years of dynamic development, which was, however, technically confined almost exclusively to IBM mainframes, and finally, a time of consolidation.

On 01 October 2000, due to the major changes in the situation of the IT market, the “Project COMback” was turned into an independent company, COMback GmbH, based at Oberreichenbach. At the beginning of 2002, in a further logical step, the majority of the company shares was sold to COMback Holding GmbH, a company in which a considerable part of the shares is held by COMback’s employees via a partnership under the German Civil Code.

Now it was high time to catch up on the new requirements. Staff was continually stocked up to 28 employees, new procedures and methods were developed, the portfolio was expanded (long-term archiving), two subsidiaries were founded, and, above all, the core business of disaster recovery was extended to all common system and hardware platforms.

Achieving this required not only major investments, but also extensive measures to expand the staff’s skills. First and foremost, however, it required focusing on what was most important: our customers.