It’s that time of year when the National Weather Service reminds us that Hurricane Season is fast approaching. Hurricane Season officially begins June 1 and ends November 30. For half the year, hurricanes are front of mind for many business and IT professionals.
Some think that a Business Continuity Plan is only for large business with hundreds or thousands of employees; not true, every business needs a plan, even sole proprietors.
Each business is unique and must decide what they will do during a natural disaster. Some will close up shop for the duration, others will shift staff to other locations, while others might have facilities large enough for key staff to live on-site until the situation improves.
What follows is a list of things to take into account when you are reviewing your Business Continuity Plan (you do review that at least annually don’t you?). By no means is this a comprehensive list of Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity needs or steps but it should get you started thinking about where your plan stands.
Connectivity
Do you have redundant internet and private network connectivity? If not, you might want to price it out and eliminate that single point of failure.
If you do have redundant connectivity, is it truly redundant or do those providers share entry points into your building and the same path in the right of way along the street outside? If they do not have separate routes from the right of way, you are only one backhoe incident away from being disconnected from everyone.
If you aren’t sure what the path each of your providers uses to get to your building, ask them – they should know.
UPS & Generator
You have all your on premise servers on UPS and your on premise datacenter backed with a generator. Your colocation servers should also have UPS just in case the datacenter needs to switch to generator power – they do have a generator don’t they?
When is the last time you checked your UPS batteries? Do they provide enough power to get the generator started and the room switched over to the generator? If those batteries are 3 years or older, it’s time to change them. Batteries are much cheaper than replacing the entire UPS, just make sure to do it before one of them swells and becomes impossible to remove from the battery bank.
Have a generator on site? When’s the last time you tested it? I don’t mean just ran it for an hour during your monthly power test (you are doing that right?), but really tested the whole system with load from your datacenter and some user equipment. Schedule that test now. Better to know what might fail so you can repair it before the business needs to be on generator power for any period of time.
Generator Fuel
If your generator is diesel or propane powered make sure you have contracts in place with reliable providers of fuel for the entirety of the Hurricane Season.
Staff Notification
How are you going to notify your staff of office status and whether they should report to work or not? There are lots of options for this from a simple call tree to SaaS providers that can send out mass text messages and automated cellphone calls. Make sure you have something in place that is appropriate for your business.
Staff Location
Your building has been damaged and cannot be occupied for an extended period. Where will your staff work during that time? Know what’s in your local area that could be used for short term rental office space. Take the time to cultivate a relationship with the property owners and tell them what your looking for. There are also options at some datacenters for temporary office space, or maybe you have a remote office that you could send some of your staff to for a short while.
In any case make sure that your business can survive a hurricane and the resulting outages and damage that can accompany them.
-- this post originally appeared on LinkedIn --