Preparing Your Business For a Hurricane
Natural disasters will wreak havoc on even the most prepared business.
You never expect it will happen to you or your business, but when a hurricane hits your hometown, you will wish you had prepared. Remember hurricane Irma in 2017? Tampa did not even suffer a direct hit, but the aftermath was devastating to many residents and businesses – mass power outages, damage from downed trees, irreparable home damage, not to mention the revenue lost by local businesses. Consider the effect another hurricane will have on your workplace, customer relationships, and your bottom line. The ability to maintain the operation of your information technology assets, including anything used to support your customers is critical.
The best time to respond to a disaster is before it happens.
Florida is no stranger to hurricanes, high winds, heavy rain, and excessive lightning. Networks and access to data can become inaccessible due to any natural disaster or severe weather. Any disruption to your business will cost you money. You may have insurance, but it will not cover all expenses or repair damage to customer relationships.
Develop an IT Disaster Recovery Plan
Business continuity focuses on the maintenance of business functions or resuming business functions after a major interruption. Developing a business continuity plan will ensure your business can continue operating even under the most extreme circumstances. In conjunction with the business continuity plan, it’s important to develop a disaster recovery plan to ensure hardware, software, and data recovery strategies are in place.
Below are four simple steps to prepare your disaster recovery plan:
- Perform an impact analysis – an impact analysis will look at all of your critical (and non-critical) IT functions and their recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). RPO is the acceptable amount of data loss, say 1 day worth of data, and RTO is the acceptable amount of time it will take to restore the activity or function.
- Identify recovery processes – pinpoint your recovery strategy for each of your critical IT functions. During this phase, you will recognize gaps between your current ability to recover and your requirements.
- Develop disaster recovery plan – document your disaster recovery procedures and assemble your recovery team. These procedures may include data backup, cloud-based system setup, contract review, evacuation plan, and an emergency communication plan.
- Educate your team – be sure your staff are aware of your disaster recovery plan and provide them with the tools/access they need to execute when disaster strikes.
As you identify gaps in your current capabilities, consider high-resiliency IT services, such as cloud-based systems to support disaster recovery, business continuity, application hosting, data storage, security, and communication. One of the greatest benefits of a cloud-based system is its availability regardless of your local circumstances. In the event of a natural disaster, your business will appear unscathed and your customers will be happy. That’s a huge win in today’s competitive marketplace.
ConnectOn delivers compliant, secure cloud-based solutions that provide continuous connectivity to applications, data, and infrastructure. Contact us for a no charge disaster recovery assessment!
