Florida businesses know the routine: a storm forms, the forecast tightens, and suddenly everyone is racing to prepare. Technology is often an afterthought until the power goes out. This checklist helps you protect your systems and keep working through outages of any kind: hurricanes, lightning, or a utility failure on a clear day.
Well before the season
- List your critical systems and decide how long you can operate without each one
- Confirm at least one backup copy lives off-site or in the cloud, and test a restore
- Put battery backups (UPS) on servers, firewalls, and network switches
- Use surge protection on every workstation and piece of network equipment
- Make sure employees can work remotely: laptops, secure access, and MFA already set up
- Document how to forward office phones to cell phones or another location
When a storm is approaching
- Verify the latest backups completed successfully
- Send laptops home with employees and confirm they can connect
- Print an emergency contact list for staff, vendors, and your IT provider
- Raise equipment off the floor and cover it with plastic if flooding is possible
- Shut down servers and equipment gracefully, in the right order, before power is lost
- Photograph equipment and serial numbers for insurance
Don’t wait for the power to drop. An orderly shutdown protects data far better than a battery running out mid-storm.
After the storm
- Check for water damage before powering anything on. Wet equipment can be destroyed by turning it on.
- Bring systems up in order: internet and firewall first, then network switches, then servers, then workstations.
- Watch for storm-related scams. Phishing emails pretending to be relief agencies, insurers, and contractors spike after every major storm.
Beyond hurricanes
The same plan covers everyday outages. If your business can’t afford to stop working when the power or internet goes down, it’s worth reviewing redundant internet connections, cloud-hosted systems, and a written continuity plan with your IT provider.