Hurricane Season Starts Now: Protect Your Computer Systems03 Aug
Eight out of ten hurricanes come in August, September or October. Worse yet, 95% of major hurricanes (winds greater than 110 miles an hour) hit in just those three months. (Thank you Eliot Kleinberg of the Palm Beach Post.)
So, while hurricane season started June 1, think of that as preseason training.
Would Your Company’s Computers Survive a Hurricane?
Who cares? No, really. Who cares if your computers get through the storm? The question you need to answer is if your business will get through the storm.
Specifically, some questions you need to be asking are:
- Will our employees be able to access our critical business systems?
- Will we have internet access and email?
- Will our phones still work?
- Are my employees able to work remotely, from their house or a temporary office location?
- Is our data backed up to multiple locations?
- How do we communicate with employees who may not have phone service?
- Are we planning to just limp along in the days immediately after the storm or do we plan on being fully-functional for all our client needs?
Too Late to Fully Prepare for the 2009 Hurricane Season
We could tell you that if you call today we can have all your computer systems protected for the 2009 hurricane season. If we did, we’d be lying.
We can help mitigate your exposure. We can virtualize your most critical systems and place them in our data center. We can establish off-site replication and server backups. We can even help you figure out how much UPS and generator power you need for your in-house computer systems and network.
What we can’t do is provide a full business continuity plan for 2009. We can’t do it and we’d be very leery of an IT services firm that would make that sort of claim this late in the season.
Start Planning Now for the 2010 Hurricane Season
Even if we could deliver a complete business continuity plan in time for this hurricane season, you don’t have it in your technology budget. So, please contact DedicatedIT today (561-491-5725) and let’s talk about 2010.
Our company is based in South Florida and we specialize in protecting your company’s technology needs in the Miami to Palm Beach to Jupiter area. We know what must be done to keep your company online because we have taken the same steps to keep our company online.
Quick Network, Server Fixes for the 2009 Hurricane Season
Before a hurricane knocks out your business, you should have a complete network assessment performed. With that document in hand, you will better know your liabilities and you’ll have the information necessary to rebuild your computer systems should it be necessary.
One Response to “Hurricane Season Starts Now: Protect Your Computer Systems”
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If if you think you have covered all the bases, you’ll still find Murphy and his law is alive and well.
I worked for a company with about a dozen remote offices linked back to the HQ with T1s. To be on the safe side, I had POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines for backup in case the PBX or the T1 tielines went down. Normally they were used for fax machines and the like until they were needed for emergencies.
When the 2004 hurricanes blew through and knocked out the power to some of the offices, we found out that our POTS lines were dead.
POTS doesn’t need electricity. It runs off power in the central telephone offices, right?
It did in the old days. These days it may run on fiber to a SLCC (Subscriber Line Carrier Circuit) somewhere in your neighborhood where it is converted to copper and POTS. When the SLCC loses power and its backup batteries die, then your POTS line does too.
BellSouth (pre-merger) was pretty good about getting generators to the SLCCs, but they were less good about being able to get around to all of them to keep them fueled up. Generator dies, batteries exhaust, POTS goes down.
By the second storm, they got better at fueling them. Unfortunately, folks who needed fuel figured out they could punch holes in the generator gas tanks and steal the go juice. Obviously, without fuel, the generator would die and, see above. Now, instead of merely refueling the generator to bring the SLCC back to life, they had to replace the whole generator.
Before the start of the 2005 hurricane season, we asked BellSouth engineering to see that all our POTS lines were delivered on copper. Surprisingly enough, we (and they) discovered that there were a lot of areas where you couldn’t go copper all the way back to the central office; in newer neighborhoods, service is delivered on fiber and then converted for the “last mile.”