Standing Firm amid Hurricanes and Worse: How to Stay Operational While Blowing in the Wind

Excerpted from The Firm Voice
Helen Vollmer, CEO of VOLLMER and Christine Barney, CEO of rbb Public Relations, recently posted a story about staying operational and surviving when the weather gets a little windy....

As we near mid-October and the rest of the country looks forward to cooler days, those of us who live along the waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf Coast are still mired in the heart of hurricane season. The last several years have seen almost a dozen of these monsters wash across our shores. As recent survivors of Hurricanes Ike and Gustav, we know firsthand that being prepared and communicating often and openly with employees, clients and vendors are the keys to staying operational and functional in even the worse case scenarios.

Of course, it's not just hurricanes we all need to be prepared for—tornadoes, floods, ice storms, health epidemics and the threat of terrorist attacks are just a few more things to keep many of us up at night. As a guide to those whose emergency plans may need a bit of tweaking, we offer the following lessons learned:

• Plan ahead. Put your disaster planning policies in writing and make sure everyone in your agency knows the drill. Have a disaster planning section on your intranet ready to serve as communication central. Update phone trees, responsibilities and procedures every year. When it comes to phone trees, apply ICE. All employees should have a form on file listing the name and numbers of someone to call, preferably in a different city, that they will be in contact with in case of an emergency. Lastly, business interruption insurance and appropriate "contents" insurance are a must have.
  
• Go co-lo. Even small businesses can now afford co-location. For a monthly charge of as low as $500, you can have a totally redundant network ready to go at the flip of a switch. These "bunker" facilities located throughout the country guarantee your network is safe. And, if you use an IP phone system, your calls are routed to voice mails or forwarded to a new number with ease. When the crisis is over, the information is transferred back to your home server with nothing lost.
  
• If you don't co-lo, get computer files out of harm's way. Run a complete back up of your files, make multiple copies and send to other offices within your jurisdiction, to colleagues within the industry you trust as well as for yourself and IT staff.

Read the rest of the story at The Firm Voice - click here.