Hurricane Sandy left a trail of destruction on the Eastern Seaboard and, two weeks later, some communities are continuing to struggle. Some have suffered devastating personal loss and many businesses have been severely disrupted. Canadian businesses that have customers or suppliers in the affected areas—including IT service providers or call centre services—have been impacted.

“BP’s contingency plans were inadequate. We were making it up day-to-day.”

For most, the primary concern during any natural disaster is ensuring the safety of your family and home. Fortunately most Canadians escaped unharmed by Hurricane Sandy, but many will have experienced the last-minute panic of trying to buy essentials like bottled water and flashlights before the storm hit, only to find store shelves were already cleaned out as people scrambled to prepare. This is a good reminder of why it is so important to have a plan in place before an emergency hits.

But it’s not just individuals and families. Business owners need to make sure they have a plan, too. Though rare, businesses also come face-to-face with communication systems outages, fires, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, ice storms, blackouts and even terrorist events.

Businesses need to maintain and recover critical business information and minimize the impact on their day-to-day operations in the event of an unforeseen occurrence. Some businesses that fail to plan for disasters may even go out of business within a year or two of a disaster striking, while others can lose significant revenue or market share. Business must ask themselves how long they can survive if their doors are closed or their systems are down.

Business owners and managers should start by being able to identify their critical business processes and dependencies, assess the impact of a disruption (both internal and external), and then prioritize processes for continuity and recovery. A good recovery plan must also consider things such as ensuring the safety of personnel, the impact of the disruption of transportation, establishing and testing alternative ways of getting the job done for the most important business processes and systems, the protection of important paper and physical assets, site recovery and alternative office space, and the loss of key vendors.

And although it’s natural to think about problems related to the physical location of a business during a disaster, what if something happens to the data or IT infrastructure? We’re living in an increasingly digital world in which IT applications and infrastructures are moving to a virtual rather than physical platform. While cloud computing is on the rise, a recent study showed that only 24% of survey respondents are using the cloud for backup and disaster recovery.¹

Once a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan is established, it must be a living document that is tested regularly. Will the backup power systems work? (New York’s University Langone Medical Centre had to evacuate all 215 patients when BOTH back up power generators failed during Hurricane Sandy.) Has the data been properly backed up? (It’s estimated that nearly a quarter of all data backups are not complete.) When things go wrong, who is in charge, and who is on the response team? (In an interview with the BBC, ousted British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward stated that his company was caught flat-footed when the oil spill disaster began in April 2010, saying “BP’s contingency plans were inadequate. We were making it up day-to-day.”) What about your customers and stakeholders—what will their needs be, and can you deliver?

There’s no way to completely insulate a business from every disruption or disaster, but the right plan can go a long way towards ensuring things go as smoothly as possible when the unexpected happens. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans can help to reduce potential financial losses, legal liability, and increase organizational stability and orderly recovery. The right plans can even lower the possibility of a disaster event occurring and decrease “outage” time. Businesses everywhere would be wise to use the lessons of Hurricane Sandy to spur them to look at their own preparedness.

TEN THINGS BUSINESSES CAN DO RIGHT NOW
TO IMPROVE THEIR DISASTER PREPAREDNESS

1. First and foremost, have a plan for keeping your employees safe. Establish a central meeting point in the event of an evacuation of your premises. Do a dry run.
2. Keep the basics in good working order. Just as you change the batteries in your home smoke detector twice a year when you change your clocks, run through a checklist for the business. Make sure that the fire detectors work, check that the “uninterruptible power supply” (UPS) really does kick in, and try restoring the offsite data backups to ensure you have the data you need to run the business.
3. Plan for effective communications in a crisis. Make sure you have a clear employee communication plan, including a phone tree with everyone’s personal contact information. Have a plan for how you are going to deal with shareholders and media.
4. Protect hard copies of business critical documents in storage cabinets that can withstand physical damage to your premises. Archive critical documents in a second, secure location.
5. If you have outsourced important business processes, ask your service provider about their disaster preparedness. Ask how you can ensure you are going to get the attention you need when you really need it.
6. Establish a plan for re-locating the business in the event that the premises are temporarily disabled. Develop a check-list of things you’ll need (desks, chairs, phones, printers and storage space for salvaged inventory) to get a skeleton staff up and running quickly.
7. Remind your staff to take their laptop home every day, particularly if there’s a chance that the office will be closed. Ensure that they all know how to log into the office LAN (or alternate system if your premises are hit) and that they have their passwords in a safe place.
8. Buy a backup generator for the office and ensure employees know how to use it safely.
9. Build a recovery plan on the assumption that a third of the staff won’t be available. If a serious disaster hits, like Hurricane Sandy, people are going to focus on the safety of their home and family—not your business. You would, too!
10. Once the crisis plan is developed, test it at least once or twice a year. Just like fire drills, the real value of the plan comes when employees have experience with a dry run before the real thing hits. Practice today so that employees aren’t doing it for the first time under the stress of an emergency.

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