Wind storms, floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters can severely damage your business, especially the most vulnerable part of your operations: your IT infrastructure. Extreme weather can knock out power, damage hardware, interrupt communications, and prevent employees from accessing critical systems.
If you’re not ready for it, a disaster causing even a short outage can lead to lost revenue, downtime, and data loss. Preparing your IT environment before storm season saves you money by helping your business stay operational and recover faster when severe weather strikes.
Let’s take a look at what you can do to better prepare for disaster season and how to respond when a disaster is imminent.
How to prepare your IT for disaster season
A bit of time and money spent now will save you much more when disaster inevitably strikes. These steps will help you prepare without large investments.
Assess risks and prepare physical infrastructure
Begin by identifying vulnerable systems and the risks they face so you can respond appropriately. Flooding? Elevate servers, networking hardware, and storage devices. Power outages or surges? Safely power down and disconnect sensitive electronics from nonessential power sources.
If a disaster is imminent, you should immediately:
- Notify employees of the situation and who to contact for updates or assistance
- Shut down noncritical systems
- Verify backup status
- Secure loose cables and hardware
- Cover sensitive equipment if you expect water or sand damage
Implement redundant power systems
Power outages are one of the most common causes of IT downtime during storms and other natural disasters. Unfortunately, without power management even brief interruptions can damage hardware, corrupt files, and disrupt your operations.
You can prevent this damage by implementing redundant power systems to keep critical equipment powered up until you can respond. Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) provide short-term backup power that gives you time to shut systems down safely.
If you anticipate longer disruptions, backup generators can keep your essential systems running so you can at least run at reduced capacity instead of shutting down completely. Just don’t forget to test your generators and UPSs regularly.
Set up and test data backups
Even if you have backup power covered, disaster-related damage can still threaten your data by destroying local devices and servers. Without reliable data backups, your business could permanently lose important customer records, financial data, or your system's custom configurations, forcing you to spend weeks or longer getting back on track.
If you are new to data backups, follow the 3-2-1 rule:
- Keep three copies of your data
- Store backups on two different media types
- Maintain one off-site or cloud-based backup copy
Cloud backups are especially valuable during disasters because employees can access data remotely even if your physical office becomes inaccessible. Just be sure to test all your backups and restoration processes to ensure they will work when you need them.
Enable secure remote work
If your employees cannot safely reach the office, they must be able to work remotely if you want to stay operational.
Implement cloud tools to ensure remote access to the apps and data your employees need, but don’t forget about security. Cyber risk increases when employees access your systems from unfamiliar locations, so use tools like virtual private networks and multifactor authentication to prevent breaches.
IT monitoring becomes especially important during this time to troubleshoot remote work issues. Your IT team or managed services provider should monitor systems for outages, connectivity issues, and cybersecurity threats that may interfere with your remote operations.
You may not be at risk of getting hit by a natural disaster now, but all it takes is one unforeseen power outage or a couple of inches of water to throw your IT systems and operations into chaos. There’s no better time than now to prepare for the worst, so contact Kortek for a FREE consultation and learn how to ensure your business’s resilience.