What would you do in the event of a natural disaster impacting your community, home and business? Even with plenty of notice, some will do nothing, others will have already made steps to survive the event. It is better to have a plan and not need it, than to not have a plan and try to survive by shooting from the hip.
Recent Events
- August 25, 2017 Hurricane Harvey makes initial landfall on San Jose Island, between Port Aransas and Port O’Connor, TX. A Category 4 storm at its’ initial landfall, Harvey had top sustained winds over 130 mph. Harvey returned to the Gulf of Mexico and made a total of 3 landfalls, twice in Texas as a Cat 4 and Cat 3 storm, the third landfall was as a Tropical Storm near Cameron, Louisiana on Aug 30.
- September 8, just before midnight local time San Dionisio del Mar, Oaxaca Mexico suffered an earthquake of epic proportions, measuring 8.2 magnitude.
- September 9, Hurricane Katia makes landfall as a Category 1 storm just north of Tecolutia, Mexico. This occurs just 26 minutes before Hurricane Irma makes landfall in Cuba as a Category 5 storm.
- September 10, Hurricane Irma makes landfall in the lower Florida Keys, then enters the Gulf of Mexico and travels north to make a second landfall on Marco Island, Fl, just south of Naples. Irma then travels up the Florida west coast into the interior of the US. A Category 4 storm at landfall, Irma had top sustained winds of 130mph.
- And, we can’t forget about the fires out west. The Eagle Creek fire in Oregon has brought ash and irritating particulates to residents of Portland, less than 50 miles west. The fires in California are burning many acres of forest as well as encroaching on homes and businesses outside Los Angeles.
Lessons Learned
Proper Planning really can Prevent Poor Performance. While many homes and businesses were devastated as a result the storms and earthquake listed above, there were many who survived unscathed or suffered minimal disruption to their daily lives because they planned for these types of events.
Those who live in Houston were urged to stock up on supplies and ‘hunker down’ to wait out the storm because of lessons learned by the Harris County Office of Emergency Management during previous storms and understood that 6 million people trying to evacuate at the same time would have resulted in many more lives lost and first responders being put in life threatening situations trying to rescue people.
Many Floridians were urged to evacuate and many heeded those calls and were able to safely get to friends and relatives in other states to wait out the storm.
Don’t Hesitate; Take Action
I personally know people that waited to try and evacuate their home until after water was coming in the front or back door. At that point, the roads are flooded and you are stuck. Don’t be afraid to act. If there is a chance that you will need to leave, do so before it’s too late.
What’s your plan?
Does your business have a plan on how to deal with an extended electrical outage, hurricane evacuation, major flooding event, fire, explosion or even an earthquake?
If not, the recent events brought to us by Mother Nature should make every business owner take stock of their current situation and develop a plan on how their business will survive this type of event.
Checklist Items
- Key Contacts: Contact Information for Key Staff, so you can keep them abreast of the situation at the office and they can keep you informed of their safety and personal situation.
- Important Papers: We hear this phrase on TV and Radio a lot, but what does it mean? Birth Certificates, ID including Passports and Drivers Licenses, Adoption Papers, Insurance Policies, Bank Account information, Partnership Documents, Vehicle titles, website passwords and any governmental or financial documents that you would have a hard time replacing or proving that you were entitled to replace.
Planning Basics
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.
What qualifies as an event? The National Weather Service officially classifies Hurricane Season to run June 1 through November 30. Some parts of the US have fire seasons, others have earthquakes to be concerned with. Although each area of the country is unique, the need for Business Continuity Planning is not.
Each business must decide what they will do during a natural disaster or other emergency. 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 (make sure you revisit that Plan at least annually). 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 the world.
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 of your on-premise servers on UPS and your datacenter on a generator, right?
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? 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 weather 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 damage 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.
A Better Idea
Let’s look at moving all those servers to a cloud model where you only need internet connectivity to get work done. While not a panacea, this sure makes planning for a disruption easier and also makes for less heating and cooling and doesn’t require the expense of a datacenter and all that hardware and additional connectivity.
Plus, with a cloud model you can look at having staff work remotely from anywhere that they can be safe and have good internet connectivity. But that’s a different conversation for another day.
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 --