Don’t Wait to Prepare

Life needs to continue after a disaster. This means thinking past the disaster to understand how you are going to physically protect the structures and contents but also the information and assets needed to communicate and work. This is a pretty big effort and one that requires good long-term advanced planning.

Protecting your home

There are many things you can do to “harden” your home. Many of the steps are the same if you have a business. There are long detailed checklists available online to help you think through this process. Here are a few suggestions for your home.

• Board up the windows if wind is a concern
• Sandbag doors if flooding is a concern. Sandbags will not make your home waterproof.
• Move valuables to a second floor or stack contents on tables and counters.
• Move planters, furniture, garbage cans and anything not anchored to the ground into the garage or inside.
• Take boats and trailers to safer locations or park them near a sturdy structure or the treeline.
• Cut vegetation back as far as possible if facing a fire disaster.
• Move your GO Bag and supplies to an interior room or under the stairs with pillows, radios and water.
• Cover pictures and art in heavy duty trash bags. If a door or window blows open, bags may protect your art.
• Copy ALL files to the cloud before you lose your Internet connection. All free email programs offer cloud storage – Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Mozy and DropBox are all cloud storage services. Contact IGTech3665.com for more information on migrating to the cloud.

Protecting your business

Hopefully, you have already migrated your business to the cloud. If you still have a server in the closet you are at a high risk of going out of business from a variety of issues. Migrating to the cloud will give you several major benefits. Cloud services such as Office 365 from Microsoft provides:

1. Work from anywhere. Home, office, on the road.
2. Work from any computer, anywhere with an internet connection.
3. Data is not in your area but large, secure data centers in multiple locations.
4. Protection for your customers to ensure you remain a viable supplier.

Other things you can do:

• Cover computers with trashbags
• Put computers on top of desks
• Wrap filing cabinets in plastic if not in the cloud
• Unplug all electronics
• Shut the server down correctly
• Move the most important items into a center room
• Board the windows

Contact www.igtech365.com to learn how they can migrate your company files, emails and services to the Office 365 cloud.

Source: Pasco County, FL Disaster Planning Guide. www.tampabayprepares.org
Download planning guide here.