Hurricane Florence: Tips to Prepare Your Business

Republished from Datto’s Blog

Originally published on September 10, 2018
By Chris Brunau

Hurricane Florence is expected to make landfall as a Category 4 storm. Florence is capable of catastrophic damage with maximum sustained winds of 130 miles per hour. The storm is expected to make landfall at the end of the week in the area of North and South Carolina.

Datto is mobilizing the Disaster Response Team to assist affected partners. The response team has SIRIS, DNA, switch, and access points available to assist. You can track the progress of the team through the Datto Twitter handle with the latest updates, observations, and insights. If you’re a Datto Partner in need of assistance, please call Datto Tech Support directly at (877)-455-6015 or email the DRT at drt@datto.com to make device and support requests.

After securing one’s personal safety and home, it’s also important to take into account the impact Florence could have on local businesses. If time allows, preparing one’s business will help those impacted get back to work following the storm.

Here are a few business continuity tips for local businesses as this storm approaches:

• Create a phone tree for your organization and stay in touch.
• Have a plan and contingencies.
  • What do you need to take from your office?
  • How will you support your customers, and from where?

• Send out the storm plan to your employees, customers and partners. Include a communications schedule and stick to it.
  • Send an update to employees every few hours with what you know and don’t know.
  • Send updates to customers, partners and suppliers with updates that affect them regularly.

• If your business cannot withstand a period of lengthy downtime, secure a facility further inland for you and your employees or ensure everyone is able to work remotely.
• Tropical storms can put data centers out of commission. Make sure your business data, backups, applications, and server images are stored off-site.
  • Your IT professionals will be able to restore systems either virtually via the cloud or at the site where you’re resuming operations.
  • If time allows, test the backups of crucial servers before the storm hits.

To highlight some quick facts about the current hurricane season and how these storms can negatively impact your business, we put together an infographic.  For more tips and information on how to protect from natural disasters, contact Brite.