With hurricane season approaching, now is the time to look at your business continuity plan. But first, let’s review a short history of the concept.

The term “disaster recovery” came into vogue in the SMB IT world approximately 40 years ago, when computer network professionals began to realize that their data was at risk. At the time, servers as large as a room performed nightly backups to tape. IT professionals would store those tapes onsite, typically in fire cabinets or safes. However, when emergencies occurred that prohibited entry into their building, they were unable to recover their information. In fact, most didn’t even have backup equipment or communications capability to quickly recover operations, rendering them “dead in the water” until access, power, and telephony were restored. The concept of disaster recovery evolved into business continuity as backup procedures, offsite locations, and redundant hardware became possible.
Business continuity has come a long way – wholly transformed by remote personal devices, widespread cellular and wifi capability, and cloud-based services.


Today’s consumers will no longer tolerate the two and three days of downtime that disaster recovery pioneers experienced. Even without a disaster event, clients are known to switch their loyalty to a new company if they are made to wait more than a few moments for the information they seek. Uptime and availability are vital for most businesses’ survival. Therefore they must look at preparedness in the new and innovative ways – and here in South Florida, the reality of hurricane season takes business continuity planning to a new level. With about six weeks remaining before hurricane season, it’s time to evaluate your organization’s disaster plan and ensure your data and operations are safe and secure.

Adapt Your Business Continuity Plan for Hurricane Season

If you have a disaster recovery / business continuity plan already in place, you need only double-check that the procedures documented are still viable. Keep in mind that for most businesses, many things have changed over the last two years, from having remote employees to changes in the network configurations.

If you are an SMB and have written a business continuity plan, you should take some fundamental steps as soon as possible to prepare your company and your customers should a disaster recent take place.

  • Set a communications strategy:  Reach out to all of your employees and clients to ensure that you have their updated contact information.  Document several methods of contact, such as email and text. Before the onset of hurricane season, you may consider establishing a hotline for employees and customers to call for information.
  • Deliberate the “if/then” scenarios:  No one can predict exactly what will occur – no one saw the lockdowns coming, for example – but your team can brainstorm a variety of broad potentialities, such as:
    If road conditions are safe, then employees can return within 2 days.
    If the infrastructure is restored, then shipments will resume within three business days.
    If the internet is functional, then the company expects employees to log on remotely within 24 hours for further instructions.
    Have your team imagine as many possibilities as they can and document your expectations.
  • Add additional support hours: If you have the capacity (and it is safe for personnel), you may consider extended hours for customer interactions.  Your clients may need to reach you outside of normal business hours as they strive to recover their own operations or home life.

Have a Data Backup and Recovery Strategy

Over the last two years, companies were forced to develop alternative strategies for securing remote communications, networks, and workspace. While we’ve gotten proficient at reacting and adjusting rapidly, it is not the optimal recovery method. Planning is always preferred and can make everything go more smoothly, without anxiety and stress levels going through the roof.

Floridians understand how to react when we hear that a hurricane is on its way, and your employees and clients should also inherently understand what procedures may become necessary should a disaster hit.

Disaster preparedness has come a long way. The cloud provides exceptional daily backup for networks and maintains data security even absent a crisis. While hosted or on-premise servers may still be appropriate in many scenarios, most IT experts now consider it expensive and risky to keep data in a single physical location. For those of us who live in disaster-prone areas, cloud-based services provide guaranteed uptime in most situations.

If you operate a business in Sarasota, a managed services plan can help you to strategize and improve your disaster plans. The IT experts at Alliance IT are here to ensure that your business can weather hurricane season without disruption or crisis.