19 Sep 5 Steps to Prepare for Hurricane Season
Is your office prepared for Mother Nature? Follow these steps to weather the storm.
1. Keep an Off-Site List of Contacts
You probably have thousands of customers and vendors. Keeping an offsite contact list will allow you to stay in touch with them and keep your business running during downtime. This list should contain vendors that you need to contact every week, as well as any customers with current, unresolved issues. Don’t forget to keep a list of employee phone numbers too.
2. Back Up Critical Data Offsite or in the Cloud
You only have a day or two after forecasters tell you that a hurricane has a high chance of hitting your area. Power failures, flooding, and looting are all risks to your infrastructure and data that come with a severe storm.
A thorough disaster recovery plan will already accommodate the offsite storage of critical data.Automated backups are your best defense against massive data loss. These systems mean one less headache when worrying about your business during a hurricane. If you don’t have such a plan, you’ll want to start backing up critical data to an offsite location as soon as possible. This will give the data time to fully transfer before the hurricane hits.
One of the best options is to store your backups in the cloud. USACI offers flexible solutions as well as a pay-as-you-go structure that lets you pay only for storage that you use. All data is backed up into our secure datacenter so that it is readily available and redundantly stored.
3. Buy a Generator
A generator can’t keep all your systems running indefinitely, but it can keep critical systems up during business hours. Good generators cost thousands of dollars and use gasoline, so they’re a steep investment.
4. Maintain Alarm Systems
Looters are a major concern during severe hurricanes. Scare away criminals and keep your equipment safe by using an alarm system. Since you might lose power, consider powering your alarm system with a generator. You’ll also want an alarm system that communicates via cellular transmitter in case power lines go down.
5. Practice Your Recovery Plan
Practice restoring your data to your servers. Reimage hard drives. Ensure that your local and remote backups can be used to restore operations in the event that you suffer extended downtime. Stepping through your recovery plan makes everyone familiar with what needs to be done to get your company back up and running.
It’s important to us that our clients have peace of mind when it comes to recovering from a disaster. If you need help with your own recovery plan, want to review your current plan, or would like more information on our solutions please give us a call at 888-393-6565 x506 or email sales@usaci.com. We’ll help you set up a complete data backup procedure to ensure that you don’t lose data in case of a catastrophic event.
No Comments