|
If this was your office, would
you be prepared?
The Boy Scouts
have an awesome motto "Be Prepared", as they teach
fellow scouts to always be prepared for any
situation. Most of us "think" this but most
never practice this as there is always an excuse,
kind of like why most never make it to the gym.
Disasters come in many forms and sizes and rarely
affect most however when they do happen, hold on to
your hat. We preach so much about disaster
recovery that most might get tired of hearing about
it, however we thought we would bring to you a
recent disaster that could have been much worse had
plans not been in place.
Recently heavy storms touched our area of Indiana,
and brought many thunderstorms which included heavy
rains and flash floods with them. One of these
storms brought a whopping 4.7 inches of rain in less
than one hour, totally overpowering the storm
water/sewer systems and flooding many businesses in
the area. One of these businesses was yours
truly, which ended up with a foot and a half of
storm water/sewage in our lower level. Luckily
we were able to get everything that was "important"
out of the flooding area before the water was too
high.
We have a contingency plan that outlines what the
next steps would be for our office to continue
operations. Luckily our office was only
off-line for about two hours, however should things
been worse, we had multiple plans already in place
to allow us continuing operations. Also
because of our HTG peer partnerships, phones and
support could of been rerouted in minutes to help us
continue operations. (It's
good to have great friends and partnerships!)
Stop and think for a moment. If your
business (or h in a disaster, do
you have working plans in place to keep business
going (or live)?
1. Is your data backed up and
held externally from your main location? If
your using USB hard drives or thumb drives, do you
have multiple copies? Backups are no good if you
can't recover data from them.
2. Do you have a contingency
plan in case a disaster kept you from continuing
business operations? How will you
continue to operate? Can you start operations
from a temporary location? Can you gain access
to your email? What is the minimum access that
you need to continue operations.
3. If you have a plan, is it
public knowledge to managers or key employees?
A plan is no good if it's not readily available for
action.
4. For home, do you have a
meeting plan to where all members of the family know
where to meet after something happens? Making
sure everyone is ok is a stress reliever.
Is your brain hurting yet? Better now than
after a disaster! There are many resources
available for disaster planning. Ready.gov
which is sponsored by the US Government has some
good quick basic plans to help get you started.
Of course we are more than happy to sit down and
discuss your current plan or help you get one in the
works.
Remember, some plans are better than NO plans.
Be safe, be prepared.
|
