Have Your Clients Taken Precautions Against A Hurricane Like Katrina?

As many meteorologists have pointed out, hurricane activity is cyclical. Over the past two decades, the cycle has been on a low. Unfortunately, the experts believe we are now entering a prolonged period of increased activity. That means we could see many more fierce hurricanes in the next 10 years than we have over the past 10.

Beautiful New Orleans had a few things going against it that exacerbated Katrina&s impact, like the fact that it sits below sea level and the levees that were built to protect it were not nearly capable of holding fast against a Category 4 hurricane.

While those issues may be unique to New Orleans, solution providers in other regions should question how their disaster-recovery plans would hold up to a fierce blow from Mother Nature.

The Northeast, for example, is an area that has not seen a storm of this ferocity in decades. If a Category 4 hurricane were to rip through the New York metropolitan area, it could cause untold damage to the infrastructure. While the flooding here might not match that seen in New Orleans, the sheer density of New York would pose other problems.

Solution providers must convince their customers to take precautions to ensure that the complete destruction of a local business&s physical facility would not result in the complete destruction of the business. This, of course, would require proper backups and remote storage of duplicate data.

How many companies with fewer than 100 employees have taken these precautions? We don&t have data on this, but that number is likely to be relatively low.

Of course, these things may be the furthest thought from anyone&s mind right now in New Orleans, where the basics of rescue and salvage were still the priorities late last week. But eventually, the effort to rebuild the city will begin. Fortunately, most major disasters have been followed by a rebirth of the region and, ultimately, growth. Industries don&t tend to abandon an area solely because of a natural disaster.

But it&s a lot easier to rebuild a business if its core data is intact and recoverable.

While security and storage have been big areas of focus over the past five years, have disaster planning and recovery garnered the same amount of attention? Have your customers given any thought to their ability to operate from a remote location while infrastructure is being rebuilt in their current location?

Disaster recovery is one of those things that can be looked at in degrees of need. Some businesses only have to prepare for some critical functions to be up and running quickly, while others have to be much more fully resourced. Whatever the case, it&s always easier to get customers to think and plan when disasters like this are top of mind rather than when the business is humming along with little threat of disruption.

It may be hard to find a place in IT budgets for disaster recovery, but perhaps you can get your clients to think of it as insurance against what they hope never occurs. Frankly, you owe it to your customers to at least raise the issue.

In the end, we all hope New Orleans and the other cities affected by Hurricane Katrina recover quickly, and that other areas of the country are spared any similar fate. But there is no guarantee of that, and it&s always better to be safe than sorry.

Make something happen. I can be reached at (781) 839-1202 or via e-mail at [email protected].