It’s the thing that we don’t want to think about.  A disaster (hurricane, tornado, flood) demolishes your office and leaves your company crippled.  While these natural disasters do occur and we do need to be prepared for them, they don’t occur that frequently.  What businesses often forget to deal with are the issues that happen suddenly such as a power outage or fire in your building.  These issues have a higher likelihood of occurring to businesses and can have just as dramatic an impact as a hurricane.

Four years ago, hurricanes crisscrossed the state of Florida where the Bayshore Solutions offices are located.  While Tampa did not experience a direct hit from any of the hurricanes, Bayshore Solutions corporate offices were severely impacted by torrential storms.  There was a great deal of rain and wind that occurred which killed power to the Westshore district.  With no power to run, the sump pumps in the basement of the building were not able to pump the water out.  The basement along with the elevator shafts flooded with water.  This series of events led to the closing of the building by the Fire Marshall and the posting of a Sherriff outside the building to enforce the closure.  Five days passed before we were able to access the building.  Power was restored to the area, but due to the great deal of water, the building was not able to open right away.  Bayshore was located on the 4^th floor of the building, so there was no flooding damage, but having no power and no access to the building posed serious challenges to keeping Bayshore running.

While Bayshore was experiencing crippling issues, our customers across the country were under sunny skies with deadlines that they were expecting us to meet.  If it were not for the precautions and procedures we had in place, both Bayshore and its customers would have suffered greater loses.

The lesson to learn from this is that we had no idea that heavy rains that can come at anytime can cause a severe disruption in your business.  And it’s not only heavy rains, it could be something as obscure as a main sewer line collapsing onto fiber or power conduit under the roads and causing an internet and power outages at your office for days.  A fire could occur on the same floor of your building and set off the sprinklers which soak and fry your servers.  Your backup tapes become unusable and all your records are gone.

Here are some simple measures to protect your business:

Backups – Sign-up with an online backup service that will backup your data to a remote location or have a company such as Iron Mountain handle the pickup and storage of your backup tapes off-site on a daily or weekly basis.  This will ensure that a copy of your data is available somewhere. 

Internet Connection – Have a second internet connection installed to your office that uses separate lines and technology than your current connection.  If you have a T-1 from Verizon you should consider getting business-class cable modem access.  These use separate lines in the ground and technology for communication protecting you.  If you were to get two T-1s, one from Verizon and one from Qwest, they would both be carried over the same lines in the ground into your building.  If there is a cable cut in the ground, both of your internet connections would go down.

Server Relocation – Move any servers that are critical to your business to a proper datacenter especially if you have multiple offices that connect back to the central office.  Most offices are susceptible to all the issues described here.  They were not built to withstand them.  Datacenters will have multiple Internet connections, power sources and many other redundancies that will ensure that your systems stay up in the event of a disaster.  If your systems are in a datacenter, your users can perform their work from their homes, hotels, temporary office space.

Mail Bagging – Sign-up with a service that can hold your email in the event that your mail server is down for some reason.  This will ensure that you do not lose any mail during your outage for however long it is.  Most services will even allow you to access your email during the outage on their servers.

Phone Re-Routing Procedures – Don’t forget about your phone system.  VOIP systems can be located within a datacenter or outsourced to provide protection from disasters.  You can re-route calls to any number that you want.  If you don’t have that ability, have a procedure in place to contact your phone company to have your local number forwarded to another phone so that your customers can reach you.

Staff Communication – Be sure to have a plan in place to communication to your employees that they should not come into to the office and how future communications will be delivered.  A phone tree works well for small companies where 3 people call 3 people and so on to deliver the message.  There are services that will send out automated messages to call lists if your organization is larger.  Have a conference bridge available for everyone to call into to communicate the current state of affairs.

As with everything mentioned here, none of these measures are effective unless they are setup ahead of time.  Most disasters happen suddenly.  There is not time to disseminate information or procedures.  They must be setup ahead of time and tested regularly to be effective.  Most people will read this and think, “Oh, that’s all great, but it all costs money and I may never need to use it.”  And that is fine.  Just be sure that you are making a conscious and well informed decision that you are not going to implement any of these measures for your business after weighing all the costs and risks.

Please feel free to contact Bayshore Solutions if you have any questions.