3 Reasons You’re Completely Unprepared for the Next Hurricane

Hurricanes and tropical storms are funny, aren’t they? One second they’re headed towards Louisiana or Mexico, and in a day they can completely change direction, regain intensity or just blow themselves out. Because of their completely unpredictable nature, you need to be sure that you’re 100% prepared for the next major hurricane. What does that entail? A few things. It starts with your disaster recovery plan and goes to your employee training and even insurance coverage. Here are a few reasons you’re completely unprepared for the next major hurricane and what you can do about it:

1. You haven’t looked at your disaster recovery plan in over a year.
   
   Disaster recovery plans need to be updated regularly. Your employees turn over, you add more job functions and your processes change as things evolve. If you’re still operating on a disaster recovery plan that is more than a year old, it likely hasn’t accommodated for these changes. Disaster recovery plans need to be looked at annually at a minimum and tweaked as necessary to accommodate for your growth and business changes.


2. You aren’t sure about your backup.
   
   How confident are you in your backup processes? Who is completing that backup? Whether it’s internal or an outsourced organization (or no one at all), you need to verify that the backups are running at regular intervals and are viable. That means testing them regularly and checking to make sure they’re running. You should also look at how often backups are being made. If you’re a growing organization with valuable data, you’ll want to run backups more frequently and test them more often. If you haven’t been run through the logistics of your backup process, take some time to contact your IT department or MSP and become familiar with it so that you can have confidence in the performance and viability of your backups.


3. You haven’t inventoried your technology for insurance records recently.
   
   If you’re a successful, growing organization you’re always purchasing new workstations, tablets and phones so that your employees can deliver efficiently on your behalf. But every time you replace a workstation, server or other piece of technology equipment, you need to make sure that you’re updating your inventory and taking photographs for insurance purposes. Having a photographed and updated inventory of your technology will make replacement must easier and less of a headache when and if something happens.

We have been lucky for the past few years when it comes to major storms, but how much longer can we hope nothing happens? Being prepared for the next major storm will give you some serious peace of mind. Update your disaster recovery plan, notify and train your employees, check on your backups and report your technology inventory to your insurance company and have detailed records on exactly your technology workstations and equipment to make things easier when you have to file a claim.

Source: B2C