Hurricane Season is Here: Is Your Business Prepared?

We’ve just turned the calendar to June, and if your business is located near the Atlantic seaboard, you know that this marks the start of hurricane season. The question is, is your organization prepared? According to the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes (FLASH), 75% of businesses without a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and hurricane preparedness measures are likely to fail due to hurricane-related damage.

If your organization doesn’t have a BCP in place—or it hasn’t been reviewed or updated recently—now is the time. In this post, we’ll delve into what a BCP is, its importance, and some key steps to take to strengthen your hurricane preparedness strategy.

What is a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)?

A BCP is a predefined set of protocols on how your business should respond in case of an emergency or natural disaster, like a hurricane. It contains contingency plans for every aspect of your organization, including HR, proprietary assets, technology, and business processes. Four key components that your BCP should focus on include:

1. Data Access: Critical information must remain accessible in the event of a hurricane. To ensure uninterrupted access, identify and prioritize the most critical files and utilize redundant systems, such as cloud backups and secure remote access solutions, to maintain operations in the event of an emergency.
2. Data Security: Hurricanes can increase your business’s vulnerability to cyber threats. To keep your data secure, enable encryption, multi-factor authentication, and secure network access. As we know, cyber threats are constantly evolving, so it’s essential to regularly audit and update security protocols to remain resilient.
3. Regulatory Compliance: Understand what information you have, where it’s stored, and who has access to ensure your BCP aligns with relevant industry regulations. Regulatory requirements change frequently, so having a strong information governance program will ensure that your business information maintains record integrity during any disruptions.
4. Data Recovery: Leverage automated backup systems to minimize downtime and data loss and regularly test recovery processes to verify that information is backing up correctly. Partnering with a secure offsite storage provider strengthens your recovery strategy by keeping paper files secure and allows for valuable records to be delivered digitally when needed.

Since disaster events can cause injury, downtime, and lost revenue, it’s crucial to prepare as much as possible in advance. Businesses that fail to recover quickly from such an event, especially small to mid-sized companies, risk losing customers to their competitors. To prevent this from happening, have a thorough BCP in place that is tried and true.

Hurricane-Specific Threats to Information Management

According to NOAA, hurricanes cause the most deaths and destruction compared to other storms, resulting in losses of trillions of dollars in damages since 1980. Additionally, FLASH notes that 40% of small businesses don’t reopen after a hurricane, and even large enterprises can experience significant operational disruptions and damage.

If your business footprint includes the Atlantic coast, you may be at serious risk, especially if a hurricane hits a location that houses your physical records. To build an effective BCP, it’s important to understand the following hurricane-specific threats and have recovery plans in place:

• Physical threats, including flooding, wind, and infrastructure damage, can destroy office buildings, onsite records, and equipment.
• Operational threats, such as power outages, network disruptions, and inaccessible facilities, can disrupt business operations and render critical information inaccessible.
• Hidden threats include water-damaged records, mold, and hardware failure. These issues may not be apparent at first but can cause long-term damage if not addressed promptly.

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BCP Best Practices

Should a hurricane hit, the outcome of your business depends on a strong BCP; or in other words, it’s your business’s lifeboat. Make sure that your plan is both practical and adaptable by following these best practices:

• Maintain an active inventory of your critical records, including what information you have, where it’s stored, how it’s stored, and who has access to it. After all, if you don’t know what you have, then how can you protect it?
• Identify and protect critical records by determining which records, both digital and physical, are critical to business operations and regulatory compliance.
• Regularly back up data and verify the restorability of those backups to prevent losing information.
• Assess the vulnerabilities of off-site and on-site storage to determine if your information is at risk from threats like flooding, fire, or structural damage.
• Confirm if your vendor will be able to continue services, such as scanning and shredding, during an emergency like a hurricane, to avoid further disruptions.
• Clearly define employee roles so that everyone knows their responsibilities during an emergency.
• Maintain an updated list of employees, clients, and vendors, and have a communication plan in place in the event of a hurricane.
• Conduct regular drills and simulations to test the effectiveness of your BCP and identify any gaps that need to be addressed. After all, your plan is only as strong as its most recent test.

A BCP is a constantly evolving document that requires annual reviews to ensure the information is accurate and that any organizational changes, security threats, regulatory requirements, new processes, or other business updates are reflected in the document. As hurricanes or other emergencies occur, be sure to incorporate any lessons learned into your BCP so that response strategies can be continually improved.

Get Started

If you’re starting a BCP from scratch and don’t have a plan yet, don’t sweat it. Ready.gov has got you covered with a valuable guide that’ll help you protect your employees, locations, and organization from natural disasters. And, to make things even easier, here’s a checklist that’ll help you assess your hurricane preparedness. If you can’t check off many items on the list, it may be time to update your BCP and disaster preparedness documentation.

For additional resources, expert guidance, and strategic tools to help your organization effectively prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptions, visit the Access Business Continuity & Preparedness (BCP) Center.

How Access Can Help

Paper might beat rock, but it will never hold up in a hurricane.

Protecting your active files and planning for disaster recovery is critical during hurricane season and beyond. Digitizing your most important documents provides an added layer of protection by reducing the risk of non-compliance, damage, or loss. If you’ve been considering making your organization more digital while ensuring security and privacy in your program, Access Unify™ could be the solution.

For records that must remain in physical formats, Access’ PRISM Privacy+ storage facilities and vaults offer advanced security and fire suppression technology to ensure your records remain safe and compliant. After all, your paper records can’t be destroyed in a hurricane if they aren’t stored onsite.

Contact an Access representative to get started today to ensure your organization’s most valuable information remains safe and sound.