Preparing your Business for Disaster Recovery

If you’re in business, you need to have a disaster recovery plan. Ideal Solutions Provider can help!

It doesn’t matter where your business is located. In the Atlantic and Gulf Coast states, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and wild fires all have their seasons. Out west, California suffers earthquakes, wildfires, drought, and mudslides. Western states have wildfires, flash floods, and drought. The Midwest? Tornadoes and flash floods. Punishing blizzards have blasted across all our Northern states.

Natural disasters are bad enough, but man-made risks are rampant, as well, from vandalism, to honest accidents, to construction or remodeling errors, even deliberate sabotage..

Is YOUR business prepared to recover when the worst happens?

Water damage, whether from rising floodwaters or falling rain, can weaken your physical plant, shorting your electrical systems, damaging walls and floors, weakening furniture and fabrics, and saturating all the components of your data and security systems.

Hurricanes and tornadoes have been known to demolish entire communities, destroying homes and businesses without rhyme or reason.

Wildfires can rage out of control in an instant, shift direction in seconds, and what the fire doesn’t consume, soot and smoke damage often render unsalvageable.

The whole world remembers the devastation of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in France, the result of a moment’s carelessness during planned renovations.

Wise business owners will manage the risk to their buildings and property with insurance policies. Buildings can be rebuilt. Furniture, inventory, and equipment can be replaced.

But it all takes time. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reports that 40% of businesses never re-open following a disaster. Another 25% fail within a year.

Happily, there are several things you can do to increase your chances of having a business to come back to after a disaster.

First, of course, make sure you have copies of important papers (including your insurance policy and equipment inventory—with serial numbers!) in a safe location away from your area. It doesn’t help to have your papers stored safely at home if the disaster is widespread enough to destroy your home, too.

Take photos of all of your equipment and keep them with those important papers.

Ensure that any outside equipment, including junction boxes, are secured, and not compromised by nearby trees/branches.

Install battery back-up for your security system, and make sure it can operate for at least two days.

Install an emergency generator to keep power to your server rooms, if your servers are on site. Even if your business doesn’t suffer structural damage, power in your area may be out for days or even weeks.

Think about protecting your data, too! After a disaster, having access to the lifeblood of your business — your information — can significantly improve your chances of re-opening and recovering.

Many businesses have moved away from relying on paper files, recognizing the benefits of digital data storage. The upside to this is having information literally available at your fingertips. Digital files can help companies save money, because digital files can do away with the rows of file cabinets that require expensive floor space.

Internal back-up, or back-up that is part of your digital network, is good if an individual work terminal shuts down: you can move to another work station and still access your information that has been saved in another part of the network.

External back-up is any solution that stores your information outside your network.

Ideal Solutions Provider encourages all our clients to practice “redundancy,” having multiple storage options for all your data, so if one pathway to your data fails, there’s always another route to reach your company’s vital files.

That may include discrete hard drives, or a series of thumb drives for specific types of files, DVRs or CDs, even old-school magnetic tape! These are great options, as long as you don’t have a disaster that wipes out the places where you’re storing all these physical components.

At Ideal Solutions Provider, we always encourage our clients to consider cloud storage as part of their external storage, as well.

With cloud storage, your files — every one of them — are duplicated and stored in a remote location. They are transferred to the remote location via the Internet. You can access them any time, from any computer with Internet access. And that means your business can continue to operate without loss of vital information. Your digital invoices, memoranda, work schedules, contacts, procedural manuals, inventory, insurance details — all can be retrieved, and work can continue from wherever you’ve set up your temporary shop.

Be aware, too, that one day your desktop or laptop computer will fail , and the files you’ve stored on it may be inaccessible. If you’ve backed up your files “in the cloud,” you can access those files, edit them, add new files, and continue working with any computer, as long as you have an Internet connection and your access codes for your cloud account.

At Ideal Solutions Provider, our expertise is in finding ways to protect your business’s telecommunications infrastructure. After a disaster, we’ll determine if rebuilding can offer you higher quality materials and equipment, at a more attractive cost.

Maybe your original infrastructure was a patchwork, pieced together as your business grew and added telecom features like VoIP telephony, video conferencing, and transfer of large data files as you made the shift to digital data storage. Ideal Solutions Provider can help you create a structured cabling system that is at once more stable, and more adaptable for future needs.

We’ll evaluate the companies offering Internet in your locale, and recommend those that offer you the bandwidth you need for current operations, and future growth. Spending too much time driving to branch or satellite offices to attend meetings? Rebuild your system with teleconferencing capabilities. Does your company rely on up-to-the-minute news or financial coverage? We can help you bring in the television signals that will keep your staff informed. We can help secure your physical plant against intrusion and theft, with a integrated security system incorporating keyless entry, sensors, closed circuit television, and video recorders.

Ideal Solutions Provider has the experience and the expertise to restore the equipment and infrastructure that will return your telecom system to full — and often improved — function, without wasting your time or money.

Disasters that wreak havoc on your physical building and equipment do not have to destroy your business. Once you, your family, and your employees are safe, you can retrieve your information, and begin the process of recovering your physical losses, using the data and files that are integral to your day-to-day operations.

Ideal Solutions Provider, with its connections to vendors and Internet Service Providers, can help speed your disaster recovery. Give us a call at 813-388-4935