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Natural Disaster Preparedness and Your Business

Almost 40% of small businesses that close due to a disaster event never re-open.

Regardless of where you are based, it is important to consider which steps to take in reducing business risk should a natural disaster occur in your area.

Though this is provided with Florida business owners in mind during our hurricane season, I strongly suggest that you check this out as it is applicable to most:

www.floridadisaster.org/business/

3 Responses

  • Aug 18, 2009

    Managing Director/Principal

    We're in San Diego so we were evacuated for the fires two years ago when it looked like they might burn right down to the ocean. I swear AmEx isn't paying me to shill for them but here's our plan: We work 100% off our server. All files back up 2x a day onsite onto external drives, 1x a day remotely (amazon.com--simple storage service--S3), and we'd be down at the Apple Store with AmEx Platinum card in hand. We can be up and running even in a hotel suite, as fast as the Apple store opens and we can install Adobe Cs4 while downloading everything from Amazon S3. It would be a skeleton

  • Aug 22, 2009

    Owner and CEO

    Great article. Just the mentioning of a disaster preparedness plan will turn off business owners because they immediately think about the costs of developing and implementing it. But Lyon lays out a simple no non sense approach to it. Plans don't need to be expensive or time consuming. Lock down what each employee is responsible for and what they need to do to get back up and operational in the shortest amount of time. Don't forget that fire is one of the biggest issues faced by business today, so make sure to store your backups either virtually or at an offsite location. Electronic copies of all your "hardcopy" paperwork is a must as well. I

  • Sep 01, 2009

    Principle

    We sell a device that backs up your servers to a local Network Attached Storage Device. This device backs up the data nightly to a secure data center on the web. If a server dies, this device can also 'act' as the dead server until the old one is repaired or replaced. It uses virtualization technology to accomplish this. And in a worst case scenario, a new device can be overnighted pre-loaded with your data from the data center. You un-pack it, power it up, and if needed you can bring up all the detroyed servers (virtually) right on the device. You are quite a long way towards being back in business from a technology standpoint. Much easier than the days of Tape Drives.

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