Weather the storms

A partial checklist of things to be aware of to help you achieve business continuity during adverse weather.

Battery backups – does all of your sensitive electronics equipment run through a battery backup or at the very least a good surge suppressor.
When was the last time you tested the battery backup?, but wait don’t pull that plug yet, is the battery and/or battery backup itself over 24 months old? Do you know that the industry recommended service life for a battery in most battery backups is only 18 months?

Phone circuit surge protection – Are your copper phone circuits run through surge suppression before entering your phone network? A single surge can cause thousands of dollars of damage, and rarely covered under any type of maintenance or warranty plans.

Data circuit surge protection – is there any surge protection in place on any of your network nodes? Do they all tie into a common ground point?

Data backups – do you do onsite backups of your business data? Do you remove the backups offsite and rotate them back on? If you don’t and it is a close enough strike you risk losing your valuable business data, including the backups. Oh, your data is backed up over the internet every night. Ok, how long does it take you to get your data back from offsite? Do you have to download it? Do you wait on CD’s to be shipped? How much business is going to be lost waiting on the recovery time?

Phone System- In the event your phone system is taken out by the storm, how long will it take you to locate the phone number to call, your account number information, do you want all your numbers forwarded to a single line, or do you have sales, customer service, accounting and human resource numbers to forward. How much business may be lost during the time it takes you to at least get the numbers forwarded. Make a list, instruct your key employees when to make the call to your phone service provider if you are not always there. Better yet, let’s talk about a phone solution that automatically handles this for you.