In the IT world, disaster season typically aligns with the fall and winter in the United States and many temperate regions. These seasons can bring hurricanes, blizzards, and other severe storms.
However, it’s important to remember that disasters can strike anywhere, at any time, including earthquakes, floods, wildfires, or even widespread power outages not tied to weather. These events can knock out power for days and severely damage your office and infrastructure. How you prepare for and react to these disasters could mean the difference between surviving and shuttering your business for good.
Extreme weather like hurricanes pose high risks to your IT, and should not be underestimated. This article will discuss the many ways you can prepare for disaster season to mitigate or even fully prevent the damage to your assets, finances, and reputation.
Assess your risks
A restaurant in North Carolina and a software developer in Texas are going to face different kinds of disasters and threats to their operations. You can’t effectively prepare to mitigate the damage of disasters if you don’t know what risks you face, so you need to take stock of the threats businesses in your industry pose the highest risk.
Ask yourself:
- What natural disasters is our region prone to?
- How much data can we afford to lose?
- Can we survive without internet? For how long?
- Which parts of our network or operations should we prioritize protection for?
Create a detailed disaster recovery plan
Once you know which threats you face and where you need to focus your efforts, you need a plan for when the disaster strikes. This disaster recovery plan (DRP) should detail what each person in your organization needs to do to mitigate the damage and make your business operational again.
Your DRP should include:
- Who’s responsible for what parts of your network
- When and how to recover data from backups
- Communication protocols to keep everyone informed
- Remote work pivot procedures, if applicable
- A step-by-step sequence for restoring operations based on priority
- Roles and contact information for IT staff or your managed services provider
Back up your data
Data backups are your safety net, as regardless of your industry, you need your business data to survive. If you are in a disaster-prone region, make sure you back up all critical data regularly to a secure, off-site location or cloud environment.
If you deal with large volumes of data, consider automated solutions that keep your data safe with minimal input from your team.
Implement physical protection for your IT
Cloud solutions and geo-redundant backups are all well and good, but don’t neglect physical protections. Natural disasters affect you by physically damaging your IT and assets, so implementing these “real space” defenses can be a cost-effective way to mitigate the majority of the risk.
Consider these protections based on your risks and network setup:
- Surge protectors for workstations, peripherals, and servers
- Water-free fire extinguishing systems
- Extreme weather-proofing and insulation (e.g. hurricane windows)
- Backup generators and uninterrupted power supplies
- Flood protection and hardware relocation
Test everything
You can make all the preparations you want, but if you don’t test them, you can’t be sure that you are ready when disaster strikes your business. You need to check each component of your disaster preparedness and recovery strategy to ensure that your solutions work as intended and your workforce knows what to expect.
- Regularly test your data backups for integrity and recoverability.
- Test your disaster recovery and data restoration processes to see how long it will take you to get back to full operations.
- Run mock disaster drills to give your employees the practice and knowledge refreshers they need.
- Have professional inspectors check your physical network and office location to determine how ready you are for the region’s most common disasters (forest fires, floods, hurricanes, etc.).
- Reassess your risks each year and update your disaster planning accordingly.
Need professional guidance for your disaster recovery plan?
Keeping all your bases covered and preparing for every possible business-ending disaster is a difficult yet vital goal to accomplish, but you don’t have to do it alone. Outsourcing to gain access to the knowledge and technology needed to protect your business is cheaper than ever, and can save you time and money compared to doing it yourself.
Get in touch with SpectrumWise for a consultation, and our IT experts will provide a tailored disaster preparedness and recovery strategy for your business based on your needs, goals, and threat profile.
