My DartPoints Portal
Spring has finally sprung, but don’t let the sunshine and warm weather distract you from preparing for what is one of the most active times of the year for severe storm outbreaks. While much of the Midwest braces for tornado season to pick up steam, those in the coastal region have less than a month to prepare before hurricane season begins in June. Following a record 30 named storms in 2020, AccuWeather meteorologists are forecasting yet another active hurricane season this year. On top of that, a strong La Niña, (the same climate pattern behind 2011’s historically catastrophic tornado outbreak,) is driving predictions for a supercharged tornado season this spring. Experts are urging those in storm-prone areas to make early preparations.
It is important to remember that severe weather extends far beyond just tornadoes and hurricanes—damaging wind, hail, flooding and lightning are also dangerous catalysts for downtime and unplanned outages. Can your business weather the storm this spring? Get a head start on business continuity and disaster preparedness by following these best practices.
Identify Your Weather Risks
To create an informed business continuity strategy, you’ll need to know which weather systems could impact your business operations. Perform a risk analysis to identify the potential weather risks to your area. Use these tools to better understand the effect of these risks on your location:
- Hurricanes – NOAA Hurricane Center
- Flooding – Slosh Map
- Tornados – US Tornado Climatology Information
Formulate a Response Plan
If a storm should impact your workplace, the safety of your employees is your top priority. It is essential to have a communications plan in place before the storm so that you’ll be able to reach employees during an emergency. Make sure you know where all your people are located and keep employee contact information is up-to-date. Identify critical employees and establish clear expectations of their duties before, during and after the storm.
If your primary workplace is inaccessible following the storm, where will your employees be able to continue working? If telecommuting works for your team, ensure they have proper access to critical data and systems. For essential in-house employees, secure an alternate workspace or disaster recovery location–with safety and accessibility in mind, of course. Put your plan in writing and test, test again.
Have a Disaster Recovery Plan
No business continuity plan is complete without taking into consideration your critical business data and applications. A Disaster Recovery plan defines how your organization’s infrastructure and applications will recover from a disaster. A comprehensive disaster recovery solution provides continuous replication of your data to a safe, secondary location, enabling you to avoid downtime at the expense of a storm or unplanned power outage and to continue business operations with little to no data loss. We recommend Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) as an easy-to-use cloud-based DR solution that boasts near real-time failover to meet your stringent recovery objectives.
With what is forecasted to be an active severe storm season ahead of us, we urge you to use this time to strengthen your business continuity and disaster recovery plan before disaster strikes. Get in touch with the IT professionals at DartPoints for assistance with developing or implementing your plan!