Winters in New England are known for being brutal, but this Spring has brought in some serious showers and flooding-whereas you might be personally prepared-is your business?
Inclement weather can cause chaos on telephones or data services and many companies only realize the importance of Recovery planning AFTER an outage or disaster has occurred. Don’t let this happen to your company-advanced planning can minimize undesired effects on your technological solutions.
What you can do:
- Write out a plan considering the utmost disaster-this will give you coverage for the lesser disasters at the same time!
- BACK UP! BACK UP! BACK UP! Important daily output should be documented and backed up.
- Make sure all your licensing code and passwords are stored in a safe place that can be recovered in the event of a disaster.
- Create a document of your plan and let your employees be aware of emergency procedures. Make sure this document has important contacts and clearly defines the roles of your employees in case of an emergency.
- Have a number your incoming calls can be re-routed to in case phone services are out.
- Have redundancy hardware and make sure you have two completely different circuits with absolutely no shared facilities and being fed by different central offices.
- Have a battery-powered AM/FM radio on hand. In the event of a communications or electrical disruption some radio stations will be operating on back-up power.
- In the event of an electrical storm, do not use a corded telephone. Also, unplug modems, faxes, and computers from the phone line. There is a possibility of an electrical charge running through the line.
- Review your plan often to make sure it is up to date.
Disaster planning is one of the most important IT projects a company can take on-think about it-what if your company could not use phones for the day-how about computers? Can your company afford the aftermath of a disaster? A well thought out Disaster Recovery Plan will protect your business and prevent total loss during an emergency, whether big or small.
Tweet
