Is Your Business Prepared for a Natural Disaster?

Years ago, a freak tornado passed through my town. I was lucky: My office was undamaged and I didn’t lose any data from my computers. What I did lose, though, was power. For three days I was unable to fire up my computer. And being unable to work was not the worst of it: All of my clients’ phone numbers were on my computer — and only on my computer — so I had no way to contact them to let them know I was going to be late, and that drove me crazy.

Today, a smartphone — a combination phone and digital device — solves that problem. And losing access to data because of an act of nature is one of the primary reasons why I advocate smartphones over plain old cell phones. With a smartphone, I always have a backup of my contacts and schedule from Outlook right on my phone. If a disaster cuts the power to my computer, my clients do not have to remain in the dark.

Small details like these can make a big difference when you’re thinking about business-continuity planning in a virtual or highly mobile business environment. Here are five ways to get prepared so your business can carry on if disaster strikes.

Back up your critical data
Fess up: More than a few of you reading this right now might not do this — or do it consistently. You need to back up your systems, and it’s not hard to do. Virtual offsite backups give you more disaster protection than onsite backups to an external hard drive, and the further offsite those backups are the less likely the tornado coming through your town will hit the site where your backups are stored.

Web-based backup services like Mozy, IBackup and others make it easy to create offsite backups for individuals and small companies, and you can set up these services to perform backups automatically — and transparently — on a regular basis. You can access these backup sets from your computer or from a Web browser on another computer — so if your original computer is lost in a storm, you can restore your data from the Web to a new machine.

Make sure your mobile employees back up their data
The key intellectual assets of many virtual companies are often spread among several employees’ computers, so it’s not enough to back up one system. You need to make sure that all your employees are also using this system to ensure that all the company’s critical assets are protected. If your employees are distributed over a broad, multistate area, it’s unlikely that a disaster will affect all of them — but you need to be sure that those who are affected are backed up so that others can continue to work.

Find out if your local network service provider is well prepared
If you’re depending on a small local service provider for your e-mail and Web servers or online collaboration services, find out about the vulnerability of its facilities. Is its infrastructure disaster-tolerant? Does it back up the data on its servers? Where is that information stored? Does your service provider have backup data centers elsewhere in the country? If not, you might want to look at some of the hosted services from a larger national service provider. Your goal is to reduce vulnerability by geographically distributing the resources you use and ensuring that those resources are properly maintained and supported.

Prepare first- and second-response plans for communications outages
Phone services, both wired and wireless, can be disrupted and overwhelmed by disasters. While service providers have learned a great deal from events like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and even stepped in to help communities in need, you should anticipate the possible difficulties of staying in touch with your mobile employees. Work out a phone chain and contingencies, and make sure everyone knows how it works. Have a first- and second-response plan: If you can’t raise everyone by e-mail, try phones. If landlines are down, try cell phones. If the cell phone network is overwhelmed or compromised, try text messaging — many times a text message will get through when a call cannot.

Share your disaster plans with your employees
OK, you have your plans in place. Now you need to communicate them to your employees and make sure everyone knows what to do in the event of an emergency. You may still run into complications, but there will be fewer than you would have had without coordinated plans.

Mark A.R. Mitchell is an avid technology buff and reporter covering small business products and the Consumer Electronics Show. He holds a master’s degree in English literature from Harvard and has worked with leading technology companies and research universities.