Brace yourself, Hurricane Florence is nearing the Carolinas and will arrive very soon. Eastern North Carolina will start to experience the effects late Thursday the 13th and early Friday the 14th of September 2018. When the storm begins, we can expect power outages, ISP services to go down as well as potential flooding and structural damage to occur. The outages will hopefully last a minimal amount of time, but as seen in other similar weather disasters, they can last for much longer.
While preparing for the storm by protecting your home and family, do not forget that it is as important to protect your company’s IT infrastructure. Extreme weather conditions of this sort can very often cause disastrous IT infrastructure damages and data loss, causing your business to suffer – we certainly do not want that. You need to be able to continue business operations when it completes its course. Therefore, now is the time to ensure all safety checks are completed in order to minimize the impact of the storm’s power.
We want you and your IT to be ready when Florence hits.
Here is a checklist of items to review:
- Backup
- Cloud: Ensure backups are up to date and that you have enough space within your subscription for a full backup.
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- Local Physical: Make sure they are in a safe location. Your physical backups should not be in a low-lying area in case of potential floods. If you do not have a cloud backup in conjunction with a local backup, it is suggested that you store a second copy of the backup in a safe, offsite location.
- Backup files in different volumes: Save your important files on your computer plus on a flash drive. Keep the latter somewhere secure.
- Make it a must to save documents as you work along to avoid losing them in case of power outage.
- Have your backup power supply ready.
- Servers and other critical equipment should be placed in elevated locations in order avoid water damage (which may lead to data loss) in case of flooding.
- Orderly shutdown of servers and other critical systems:
- Unplug all equipment to avoid short-circuits in case of flooding.
- Shut down computers to avoid power surge issues which can fry your devices.
- System Updates (Server, Workstation, and Network Devices)
- Make sure that no system updates (inclusive of Servers, Workstations, and network devices) are scheduled to occur during the “shock period”; having the machine/device unexpectedly shut down during an update is a certain recipe for disaster as this can corrupt the machine/device and render it unusable (at which point it would have to be replaced by using an image if a restore point is not available).
- Do not attempt to clean or repair damaged servers by yourself:
- Improper handling of your equipment may result in additional damage rendering data irrecoverable.
- Contingency Planning with SAM IT for Support:
- If you plan to be open immediately before/after the storm, please communicate your plans to SAM IT so that we may include you within our planning preparations in case onsite support is needed. You are automatically included if you are a service based business who is open for extended hours (examples include grocery stores, gas stations, urgent cares, etc.)
SAM IT Solutions can ensure the safety of your priceless data assets by creating and managing your backups, hosting your website and applications and storing your database system. Should the unthinkable occur, and you lose most or all of your data, SAM IT Solutions will have you back up and running quickly with a minimum interruption of your business.
You can rest easy with a SAM IT Solutions Disaster and Recovery plan.
We are here in case you have any concerns or questions. You can reach us at 919-800-0044.
On behalf of SAM IT Solutions, we request you to please be safe!
Pallavi Gungaram
Marketing Executive
SAM IT Solutions
Image Credits: NOAA.
