Good morning Florida and anybody else that might be watching. Hopefully we’ve all survived the cold and the wind and everything else that has been going out there in the different regions of the US with this crazy weather we’ve had over the past few months.
Guess what. It’s not over yet. Hurricane season is not too far away and yes, I’m going to preach about disaster recovery and business continuity because it’s not about how do you recover from that disaster, but how do you keep operating and moving forward once the disaster has happened or how do you operate through that disaster.
Does your business need to stay up and running five days a week, eight hours a day even through a disaster? How do you make that happen? How do your customers or your vendors get a hold of you? Where are your people going to work from? How are they going to communicate? Technology is a beautiful thing. It allows us to operate almost anytime anyhow from anywhere. But we need to know how we’re going to do that ahead of time.
How are the phone calls going to come in? Who’s going to answer them? Is Suzie going to work from a hotel with a voice over IP phone and a laptop on a hot spot over VPN? Confused? I bet you are. But it’s not hard. It’s actually pretty easy. There’s a lot of things that you can do to keep your business up and running during and after a disaster.
That disaster doesn’t have to be major hurricane. It doesn’t have to be Irma’s evil sister. It can be a site disaster. It could be a flood. It could be a fire. Are you in a multi-tenant building? I’m sure you’re secure and you’ve done your due diligence. But what about your business neighbor? Have they? Their risks can put you at risk and you need to be prepared for that. You need to have policies in place both from a business operation standpoint and a technical standpoint that’s going to allow you to not lose business, not lose employees and jeopardize livelihoods.
Business continuity and disaster recovery planning requires a little bit of knowledge, requires some experience. So get with the local IT provider that’s going to help you with your technology side. Get with some business consultants that are going to help you with your operations side. Stay safe, stay secure, stay in business. Have a great day.
