5 Ways to Prepare Your Business for Disaster
By DEBRA A. PIERSON   

   What's the chance of a natural disaster striking your business–rising flood waters taking out your servers and ruining physical files, high winds knocking down power lines and Internet connections, earthquakes disrupting working environments?
   If you work in Central Pennsylvania, you just experienced those disasters last year, as well as hail and tornadoes.
   Twenty-five percent or more of small businesses do not reopen following a disaster, says the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IIBS). The events of this past year should serve as a warning and an opportunity for business owners to create preparedness plans–disasters can, and will, happen close to home.
   “Small-business owners invest a tremendous amount of time, money, and resources to make their ventures successful, and yet, while the importance of emergency planning may seem self-evident, it may get put on the backburner in the face of more immediate concerns," says the U.S. Small Business Administration.
   Can we prepare for disasters? Yes. Here are five actions to mitigate disasters and maintain your business if and when they do occur.

1. Protect your team.
   Priority No. 1 during a disaster is ensuring that your people are safe and have what they need to deal with the crisis. Communicating with employees can take a significant amount of time, so consider an emergency call list that divides contacts into a phone chain, text messaging chain, email chain, or Twitter chain.
   This will allow quick communication to your team about business requirements, as well as ascertain their safety and need for assistance. Small businesses can purchase speed-calling services, such as OneCall Now, that will reach all employees within minutes and leave a recorded message.

2. Keep the cash coming in.
    When my husband owned a small landscaping company, the most critical resource to keep money coming in was his commercial lawn mower. As soon as he could afford to, he bought a second mower to make sure that he could meet his customers' needs and keep billing in the event of equipment failure.
    You might be the company that is called upon in the event of disasters, too. If you operate a water removal business and a wet vac or other water extraction system goes on the fritz, it's lost money then and possibly in the future because your clients may contract with someone else going forward. Plan to keep cash coming in with equipment preparedness.

3. Prepare for critical system and intellectual property backup.
    In the article, "Disaster Recovery: How to Protect Your Technology in the Event of a Disaster," author Bob Xavier says, "… Disaster recovery is a business problem as much as it is a technology problem. The business decision makers need to be involved in establishing the priorities."
   What does this mean for your business? What resources are critical to keep the cash flowing during a disaster? What's the maximum timeframe you can be without critical resources? Then plan to access additional resources–rent, borrow, or buy additional equipment.
    If your critical resource is real estate, you'll need to consider backup facilities. If your critical resource includes technology, you'll need to replace it quickly or have a backup system in place, such as offsite storage (either through a contracted facility like Iron Mountain, or a cloud-based service like Mozy-Pro) or onsite facilities like tape or CD.

4. Office away from the office.
   Recent and lengthy power outages in our region have proven to be a business vulnerability. Last spring, our warehouse lost power for two days. Although this happened over a weekend, it inspired us to devise a plan for a long-term power outage. We purchased a backup generator so we can continue serving customers even if we lose power.
   If you have an office-based company or storefront that hosts clients or customers, you will need a facility in the event that your workplace is damaged. Determine an alternate location in advance. If you have multiple locations, consider using one of the other sites to temporarily house your operations.
   Other options might include employees working from home or temporarily using the facilities of a supplier, prime contractor, or key customer. PCCi has identified our second location as our backup site. It is currently used as a warehouse, but telephones have been installed as well as Internet service and our backup server so that it can almost immediately be used as a disaster recovery location.

5. Prepare to live in the 1980s.
   Companies are critically tied to the technology they use to run their businesses. What if your business was suddenly transported to 1985 and the most current technology available was a landline and a fax machine? Be able to operate without technology for a short time in the event of a regional disaster.
    And, create a plan for quickly replacing your critical technology. What data do you need? Where are the software CDs? How soon can your IT support personnel prepare a new environment for your team? Consider offsite backups using an online service or use physical copies kept off site or a mirrored server that transfers data to another location in real-time.
   Can your paper files be accessed via electronic systems? Consider installing a redundant backup system that includes offsite, automated data copies of email and other files at the server and individual user level and a duplicate server that performs automatic data synchronization. This will allow you to switch to your backup server within minutes.
    As recent events have proven, a disaster or disrupter can be business killers unless you have a plan and communicate it to all stakeholders. These five simple steps can be the difference between your business survival or demise and will go a long way in protecting your company, your information, and you and your team's livelihood.

Debra Pierson is president of Pierson Computing Connection, Inc., a Mechanicsburg, Pa.,-based technology company that specializes in providing services to large commercial customers and government agencies across the East Coast. www.piersoncci.com.