5 Disaster Prevention Tips to Help California Businesses Better Prepare for Natural Disasters
Natural disasters can be both unpredictable and unavoidable. From loss of structure, habitat, property, and life, the associated damage can be unthinkable.
For businesses, natural disasters can prove detrimental in many different ways. From preventing staff from making it into work, to facility power loss halting operations, to IT crashes causing critical data loss, and much more, there really is only one all-encompassing way a business can endure a natural disaster – plan ahead.
With the state of California now experiencing a new year-round fire season, in addition to recently braving the two largest earthquakes to hit the state in twenty years, it’s more important than ever for companies to have a concrete disaster prevention plan.
Here are 5 disaster prevention tips that can help California businesses better prepare for natural disasters.
1. Plan Safety First
To protect your business, first protect your employees and clients. For any brick and mortar business, it’s essential that staff know how to physically respond during a disaster. From practicing evacuation routes, to knowing who to call for what emergency, to having life-saving supplies available on site, to knowing where backup generators or susceptible gas lines are located – the number one rule in disaster prevention planning should always be safety first.
While business owners may have these items personally available, it’s critical this information is both shared and available to any and all staff on site.
2. Get and Understand Your Insurance
When was the last time you looked thoroughly into your company’s insurance policy? Do you know what aspects of your business are covered in lieu of a natural disaster? Have you calculated if this coverage is even close to enough to keep your company afloat in the aftermath?
Investing in adequate insurance coverage is imperative in preparing for natural disasters. Aside from insuring your physical business property, with California’s frequency of catastrophic events, further researching business interruption, loss of use, and extended coverage packages are worth serious consideration.
Do you know how much downtime can cost your business? Learn more by checking out our “The Cost of Internet Downtime” Infographic.
3. Communicate Business Critical Priorities
In the event of a disaster, does your team fully understand what your business-critical priorities are? Do you? For example, is your first priority to communicate with your customers? If you’re a liquor store, is it to save all your unbroken inventory? Perhaps a hotel places top priority on evacuating all staff and guests rather than securing cash drawers; do new employees know this?
Whatever a company’s priorities are, it’s crucial to have them not only documented but also communicated company-wide. Once priorities are established and well-known, businesses should create an associated action plan of how to clearly execute in a variety of natural disasters and emergency situations.
4. Get Redundant
Most all businesses these days require some sort of access to both a power source and the Internet. Thus, what happens if a fire knocks out your building’s power and literally destroys your terrestrial fiber line? Can you still conduct business as usual? Well, if not prepared, the answer is likely no. In fact, it might take a while – even months – to get reconnected and operational depending on the damage. This unfavorable situation, however, is avoidable.
How? Get redundant – or in other words – have “backups on deck”. Get a power generator (or 2), and upgrade your internal network. A truly redundant Business network should integrate both air and ground technologies, such as a fixed wireless and fiber circuit. This prevents a single point of failure from potentially wiping out both circuits running through the same conduit. In the event of a full network outage, if you bundle in an SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide-Area Network) device, it can trigger backup failover automatically.
5. Protect Your Data
Natural disasters have the power to destroy office networks, online systems, hard drives, and really any physical source responsible for storing critical business information. Thus, tip number five – protect your data.
If able, back up data nightly to both dependable hard drives (at least one housed off site) and to the cloud. If your company hasn’t already began to migrate business records to the cloud, it’s time to get up – literally – and onramp. Learn more about Cloud On-ramping here.
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Ultimately, it’s time for California business owners to shift from a disaster recovery to a disaster prevention mindset. Natural disasters will continue to be inevitable – whether your business survives and thrives, however, depends entirely on what you strategically plan and prepare for.
For further disaster prevention tips read: “Disaster Recovery Plan – The Only Way to Ensure Business Continuity”.
To learn more about GeoLinks GeoLit Disaster Prevention Bundle, call and talk to one of the GeoLinks’ team members today!
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