Hurricane season is right around the corner and the first tropical storm has already come and gone off the coast of  South Carolina.  Be prepared this year ahead of time.  Consider your options for stand-by business operations and remote communications with customers, vendors and employees.  Are you regularly backing up your critical data?  Do you have a plan in place to access this data during a disaster or business-down emergency?   Have you appointed key employees to manage certain aspects of your business continuity and disaster recovery plan?  One critical point to consider in your planning is the ‘recovery’ phase.  Think this through from end-to-end before purchasing additional hardware, software or services.

Do you know what disaster planning should include when preparing your business for the unknown, unexpected and unprepared?  Planning for a disaster takes many different angles, revisions, discussions, due diligence and process review even just to successfully lay the groundwork for a plan… much less a tested and successful plan.  And, don’t forget, a plan is just that, a PLAN.

Your plan should be comprehensive, picked apart, reassembled and tested regularly by different members of your team.  Only during this vetting process will your plan become a solid foundation prepared for disaster.

And, one last thing to keep top of mind… a disaster of some magnitude will occur with your infrastructure during your leadership period.

Be prepared.