From June to November, businesses across South Florida and the Caribbean plan around the possibility of power cuts, flooding, and days when nobody can reach the office. Most of the damage a storm does to a business is not to the building — it is to the data, the phones, and the hours of downtime afterwards. This checklist is what we run through with clients before every season.
1. Get your data off-site — and test it
Your critical data should exist somewhere the storm cannot reach: an encrypted cloud backup in a different region. Then run a restore test. A backup you have never restored is a guess, not a plan, and the week before a storm is the wrong time to find out it does not work.
2. Protect the hardware that has to stay
Servers, switches, and firewalls should sit on properly sized UPS units with surge protection, configured to shut down cleanly when the battery runs low. Move equipment off the floor, away from windows, and note which items you will unplug or bag before the storm arrives.
3. Make sure everyone can work from anywhere
Check that every staff member can reach email, files, and business applications securely from home, with multi-factor authentication turned on. If remote access only works from the office network, it will not work when you need it most.
4. Keep the phones answering
A hosted VoIP system keeps your main number working even when the office is dark: calls can ring staff mobiles or softphones, and you can switch to a storm greeting in minutes. If you still rely on on-site phone lines, plan call forwarding before the storm, not during it.
5. Write the plan down and share it
Decide in advance who shuts down equipment, who contacts clients, who has the vendor and carrier phone numbers, and how staff check in. Print a copy — during an outage, the plan stored on the office server is the one nobody can open.
6. Review after every season
After each storm season, review what worked and what did not, and update the plan. Staff change, equipment changes, and so do your risks.
We help businesses in South Florida and Jamaica put this in place — backups, power protection, remote access, and hosted VoIP — so a storm is an inconvenience rather than a crisis.
Related service: IT Solutions — Managed IT, backups, disaster recovery, and security.