Double-Take Software

A few months ago I posted some hurricane preparedness tips which were a result of a poll from my business continuity professional peers. Gustav appears to be taking a track that would make landfall in the south within the next few days so, the time to start planning and reviewing your BCP (Business Continuity Plan) and procedures is now. If there is a bright side to the hurricane making landfall it may be that it is coming over the Labor Day weekend where most families may already be planning a trip further inland and away from the coast. The number one priority of any BCP is to protect your most valuable asset, your employees and making sure they and their families are safe.

Keep a backpack of supplies for your family as well as with your business continuity plan in the event of any disasters. A typical evacuation bag includes some of the following:

-        Water – most important of all items

-        Food, snacks, granola bars, nuts

-        Flashlight w/ batteries

-        Battery operated or better yet crank radio for communication

-        Two-way radio for communication between employees or family members (don’t rely on the cell phone towers being available)

-        Medicine and or first aid

-        Rain Gear, spare dry cloths

The next step is to being resuming critical business operations in the event of power outage or natural disaster. However, don’t wait until the Hurricane makes landfall start reviewing your plans now and see what can be done proactively in preparation for landfall. Many businesses already have co-location or disaster recovery centers in place so there isn’t any reason why you can start transferring some of the business critical operations to those facilities now. There is a reason why Double-Take Professional Services has been offering the Failsafe Service over the last several years and that is to make data center managers self sufficient for failing over servers to their DR center in preparation for a disastrous event occurs. So, don’t wait for the disaster to hit before reacting, react before the disaster.

I had the opportunity to assist many customer restore business operations from previous hurricanes and there is no better example than the case study below. Hatch Mott MacDonald (HMM) initiated their failover plans several days before Hurricane Katrina hit and was able to close their office to allow employees to access their business critical systems from any VPN connection. This not only met the primary objective of protecting the employees but it also protected the companies assets while allowing functional operation to continue. To read the full case study click here.

Another company that I assisted during this time was a large insurance provider who fortunately didn’t have to failover but we were prepared as their generators were close to running out of fuel powering the data center. So if you have generators check your fuel supply and verify that you have the ability to operate in the case of a power outage.

Here are additional suggestions and resources from our friends on the Business Continuity Exchange.

• Hurricanes can be tracked as well as other storms at NOAA http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
• Whilst there are lots of sites with good info on preparing for hurricanes, I thought the Florida emergency mgmt site was the most accessible site I’ve come across for family/home planning http://www.floridadisaster.org/
• Have a family plan as to where to meet and how to contact everyone in your family. Also have a contact person that is out of state in case you need to use that person to communicate through.

• Important papers in a water proof container (i.e. insurance policies, medical records, logs/inventory of your valuable possessions that you cannot take with you at the last minute – digital photos of property).
• Have some cash spread among members of your family in case ATM’s are off line.
• Make sure that the vehicles that you may have to evacuate with are fully fueled (once power goes out some gas stations will not have generators to work the pumps).
• Have board/card games so that the kids can occupy themselves.
• Check on the elderly in your family/neighbors to see if they have enough for 72 hours to survive a storm until help arrives or if there is a special needs shelter in the area that they can be evacuated to.
• Make sure you have enough pet food and additional water for your pets. Know the location of your pet friendly shelters.
• Make sure your pets have ID tags and if possible have you pets ID chipped (about $35 per cat/dog)
• We have had to invoke our company BCP’s a number of times in the past for hurricanes and they get reviewed/updated annually, we also actively track tropical storms/hurricanes so we can invoke in good time when necessary.

If you are a Double-Take Software customer then you have the option to be proactive to initiate failover plans prior to a disaster event. And if you are caught by surprise you always have world class 24X7 support from our staff of professionals in Indianapolis, IN.

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