It's Hurricane Season again and all eyes are on the National Hurricane Center to see what the storms will do next.  There are a lot of lists and articles telling us what to do to get ourselves prepped [Prepare yourself and your family first.  People are more important than data.] 

                                                       

But what about our offices (home and business)?  What do we do there?

 

When personal plans are in place and you are ready to turn to digital preparations, there are definitely things you can do to make things easier after the storm.  First things first, if you have Business Continuity and Communication Plans, please review them and redistribute them to your employees so everyone knows what the plans are and what their part is.  If you do not have these, do not worry about making formal ones now.

 

Communication

You will need to know how to communicate effectively if the storm hits.  Do you know how to communicate with your staff during a disaster?  If there is an outage and your server is down?  If you do not already have an office contact list, have someone prepare one.  Consider including home phone, cell phone and private email addresses.

 

Do you know how to communicate with your clients and customers?  Will you need a recorded message?  Do you know how to record the message from outside of the office?  Do you need a sign for the door?  For businesses where clients make appointments, it is a good idea to have your staff print their calendars and make sure they have communication information for the clients with whom they have appointments the week following a potential disaster.  Do you know how to let the local media know if you close?   Have the information handy so you are not required to research it when you need it most.

 

Do you know the login information for Facebook and Twitter accounts so you can leave messages there for your clients and staff?  Do you want your staff to set "out-of-office" messages as they leave?

 

What about vendor and bank accounts?  Do you know how to communicate with your vendors? 

 

For Your Home

Is your cell phone address book up to date?  Do you know how to communicate with loved ones? What about extended family who may worry about you?  Be certain to utilize Facebook Safety Check if that becomes available to you. 

 

Backups

 

Your office should already have a backup strategy in place and working.  Now is a great time to check the backups. Make sure they are reporting nightly successes.  If you have time, do a test restore of a single document.  Did it work well?  If your backup strategy includes off-site backups, make sure the logs indicate off-site communication is working.  If your backup does not include an off-site backup, consider how to take a backup with you.  Order a removable drive if needed.  Make sure it is large enough to do the job.  Or ask your IT professional to set up an  online backup solution (it is not too late to do this).

 

Working Copies

Ask your staff to think about their deadlines for the following week.  If they have conferences, CLEs, court cases, marketing meetings, client presentations, etc., they should consider printing and/or putting a copy of any materials they need on a USB drive in case they cannot access their computers or the server.

 

Personal Data

Consider what you would need digitally if all of your computers got wet or damaged.  What documents do you need?  Do you have a copy somewhere? Are your photos backed up to the cloud?  Do you need an online backup solution? 

 

Physical Dangers to Equipment

 

Storms can bring a lot of water and wind.  Systems can be in danger from rain (even if windows normally do not leak they could this time), flood and wind.  Your equipment may also be in danger from power surges. 

For Your Home  

Considerations for home are the same as for business.

With a little advanced planning we can sometimes make hurricanes - maybe - a little less disastrous.