The recent hurricanes in Texas and Florida should not be a wake-up call to make sure your organization is prepared for a disaster. Rather, it should serve as a reminder to update or test your current plan to make sure your organization is as prepared as it can be. Advanced warning can only help so much, earthquakes, flooding and hurricanes are unpredictable, and sometimes there only a few days or hours of advanced notice before they strike. If you don’t have a disaster recovery plan or outlined steps to take when a disaster strikes your company, we listed a few to help get you started below.
Know your Location:
Each region in the United States has its own set of risks that can happen due to weather or natural occurrence. The west coast specifically California is more susceptible to earthquakes and the northeast region can experience severe cold, snow and ice for example. Know and understand the areas where you have offices, and get familiar with the possible disasters that can take place in your region. This should be the first step in creating your disaster recovery plan.
Contingency Plan:
The safety of your employees should be your primary concern when planning for a disaster. Make sure your plan start with announcements to your employees, so that they know where to go or who to contact in case of an emergency. Practice evacuation procedures in the office, in case a weather or other incident is imminent. The next priority are your clients, make sure you have protocols in place to inform your customers of your plan, and what they should expect from you in case business cannot continue or needs to be paused.
Data Backup:
In today’s connected environment, there should always be a plan in place to immediately backup your most precious data in case of a disaster. Avoid a data catastrophe by having redundancies in place, like automatic cloud data backups and or off-site storage.
Emergency Equipment & Supplies:
In case of a long-term outage, or inaccessible roads that will halt deliveries, make sure to have ample supplies on-hand. Obviously stocking office supplies like paper, pens and such are key in case of distribution delays. However, bottled water, flashlights and blankets would be valuable items to have on-premise in case a disaster renders it unsafe to travel on roads or use public transportation.
Insurance:
Often overlooked, make sure to take a look at your insurance policies on a yearly basis to keep up-to-date in case of changes. It’s also a good time to review your policies yearly, to ensure that your organizations bases are covered for anything that can possibly occur. It also may not be a bade idea to take an inventory of what is in your office. Upload inventory reports to the cloud so that you can easily access them in the future in case of disaster.
Fidelus Technologies, based out of New York City is a Professional and Managed Information Technology Services company focused on customer success and business efficiency . Our services provide seamless networking, data center, wireless, security and unified communications expertise for enterprise businesses. We have a consultative life cycle approach that includes requirements gathering, assessments, solution design, planning, project management, engineering, adoption and evolution (training) services to fully support the IT needs of your organization.
If you’re looking for more information on how Fidelus can help with your current IT environment, please contact us here.
