As we close a particularly difficult hurricane season, we’re more thankful than ever to have found an innovative backup solution developer and partner, Datto. Following Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, Datto was on location helping install and deploy emergency backups.
These backups help anyone threatened by business downtime recover company data and resume operations almost instantly. Because the threat of downtime doesn’t disappear with hurricane season, we’ve compiled a list to help you prepare your business for a potential natural disaster or power outage.
Natural Disaster Preparation Checklist
Here is a short checklist you and your IT team can work through to ensure your business is prepared for a natural disaster:
- Examine your policies and procedures regarding natural disasters alongside your HR and IT teams.
- Test & verify your data backups:
- Are they working correctly?
- Can you restore systems or files only?
- How long would it take to restore your data?
- Ensure data backups are being sent successfully to the cloud (or another DR site), so that, should your power or hardware fail, you’ll still be able to restore your data.
- Create a plan for:
- Ongoing communication with employees, partners, and customers during the natural disaster.
- Customer support and/or remote operations.
- Safely storing or evacuating portable hardware.
- Communicate your plan through multiple channels (staff meetings, email, text, phone, etc.)
- Review your insurance coverage for natural disasters. (Keep in mind that even if you’re covered, the demands on insurance companies posed by natural disasters often equate to long waiting periods.)
- Take action as soon as possible. Preparing your team and verifying your backups must happen as far in advance as time allows.
TIP: If your backups are taken less than daily—or if your data-based backup would restore files but would require a complete system reboot—consider an image-based backup solution like Datto.
Corsica Technologies partners with Datto to provide our backup clients with frequent, whole-system backups. If you’re an Corsica Technologies backup client, contact support@edts.com for your latest data verification screenshots.
How Long Will This Take?
Forming and communicating a natural disaster plan for your company need only take a matter of hours, if necessary. (Your plan can always be refined later, but if a natural disaster is looming, it’s best to have something in place.)
Testing and reviewing backups may take one day to a week or more, depending on the amount of data your company would need to restore.
