Business Continuity Tips for Weathering Hurricane Season

Business Continuity Tips for Weathering Hurricane Season

Hurricane season has officially begun, and forecasters with the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration are predicting “above normal” activity with up to 17 named storms developing in the Atlantic through November. No matter how many storms actually develop, it only takes one to significantly — and perhaps permanently — disrupt your business operations.

Nevertheless, emergency planning remains a back-burner issue for a remarkably large number of businesses. A recent Harris Poll of U.S. small-business owners found that 68 percent don’t have a written disaster recovery plan — even though about half said it would take at least three months to recover from a natural disaster.

Could your business survive three months of downtime? If not, now is a good time for a serious evaluation of your business continuity strategy.

First, it is important to understand the difference between disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC). DR is a tactical plan for restoring business systems and data in the event of a disaster. BC planning occurs on a more strategic level and covers facilities management, human safety, risk management, personnel policies, intellectual property and internal communication procedures.

Here are a few tips for getting prepared:

Batten down the hatches: Take an honest look at your office to see how you could more safely and securely store files, materials and heavy items. Are emergency exits and fire extinguishers up to code? Perform quarterly assessments to ensure your workspace is prepared. Often local fire and safety officials will assist for little or no charge.

Spread the word: Just as with home emergency plans, it helps for businesses to create a detailed procedure for what to do in the event something happens, whether employees are in the office, en route or at home. That could mean office-wide fire drills and call lists to get the word out quickly.

Protect your data: An effective plan should address backup and recovery procedures, offsite data storage and electronic and physical network access. The plan would also include a list of all business functions, ranked in priority according to which must be back in operation first. Once these priorities are established, recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) should be established for each function. The RTO is the allowable amount of downtime before the function is brought back online, while the RPO is the allowable amount of data loss since the last backup.

Use the cloud: Cloud data backups make your business more resilient. Saving data to offsite makes it easy to failover to the second site in the event of a disaster, or if there is simply a hardware or software failure. You can also failover applications or entire virtual machine images.

Test your plan: Having a plan is essential, but you need to test it to make sure everyone knows what to do. Review your plans regularly with managers and team members, and conduct periodic disaster simulations and tabletop exercises to ensure everyone understands their roles and responsibilities. Revise the plan whenever you incorporate significant changes to your operational or technology infrastructure.

The beginning of hurricane season is a good time to revisit your business continuity plans, but it is important to remember that not all disasters involve storms, floods or fires. In fact, most corporate data losses result from more mundane events such as hardware failures, power outages and human error. A comprehensive business continuity plan should cover any scenario that could result in lost revenue, lost data, lost customer confidence or compliance headaches.

If you don’t have a business continuity plan, or lack the time and resources to give it the attention it deserves, give Verteks a call. We can prepare an in-depth analysis of your disaster preparedness, and customize a plan to fit your specific needs.


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