It’s been a few weeks since we here in Houston and the surrounding areas were hit with record breaking flood waters and a lot of you are reflecting on what you could have done to be more prepared. There are many horror stories regarding businesses that are still not back in operation. Some companies are even sharing space just to get back to some resemblance of normal day-to-day operations. The floods clearly did not discriminate on who they impacted. Businesses large and small were impacted.
How did you fare? Did you lose workstations, servers, network equipment, or data?
A positive aspect was that we skipped the strong winds normally associated with a tropical storm/hurricane. That would have caused even more power issues, which would have resulted in even greater data IT damage and data loss. IT Infrastructure requires power to run and if your systems stayed dry, then chances are you suffered no data loss, one of the worst things to happen in a disaster. Having to locate new hardware, load operating systems and then restore data can be a long and usually strenuous process, which hinders a business from returning to full operation.
I have heard from many IT management folks in Houston who are starting to re-think their IT plans after the storm. These plans range from moving more systems to the cloud, migrating systems to data centers, and figuring out how to get their teams back to work when the office is inaccessible.
No matter how you fared from Hurricane Harvey, I think everyone should be reviewing and openly discussing Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity for their business. So what questions should you should be asking yourself to know how your business really fared when the storm had passed and the flood waters had receded?
Start by breaking it down into three buckets:
- Staff/Employees
- Facilities
- IT Infrastructure
Each bucket will have numerous bullets associated with it to help determine how your business fared. Those bullets will be different for every business depending on what you want/need to focus on related to Disaster Recovery and Disaster Preparedness.
Figuring out what they should be, and more importantly how to accomplish them, is where an experienced IT Consulting team can be really helpful. If you are trying to figure out what to do next, give me a call. We have been helping local Houston companies weather the storms for over 15 years. Let us help you prepare for the next one.
Visit https://chrmanagedservices.com/disaster-recovery-managed-it-services/ for more information or call us at 713.351.5196.
