This week in 1991, Hurricane Bob made landfall in Massachusetts and resulted in the death of six people in Connecticut. It is the last time a storm of that magnitude made landfall in Massachusetts, but for residents in many other areas, like New York, they only need to think back to last October when Hurricane Sandy made landfall and devastated large areas of the tri-state area, some of which is still recovering.

While news organizations in Massachusetts are showing video of the storm 22 years ago, is it a reminder that devastation can happen when you least expect it and it is important to be ready. This is critical for businesses as well, because the livelihood of all employees will depend on whether a business is able to get back up and running following a natural disaster.

Unfortunately, a recent study found that a majority of companies are failing in this department. Released by the Disaster Recovery Preparedness (DRP) Council, 72 percent of organizations worldwide received a grade of D or F when it comes to disaster readiness.

“Initial results from the Disaster Recovery Preparedness survey are startling and highlight the need for IT organizations to significantly improve their DR processes,” Dave Simpson, a senior storage analyst at 451 Research, said in the report. “It’s clear that many end users are not aware of the fact that today there are cost-effective methods of automating all aspects of disaster recovery, from planning and implementation to, perhaps most importantly, DR testing.”

One step can be to partner with a document storage company that can assist your firm in identifying and protecting Essential Records. Essential Records are the records that are required for to respond to an emergency and to resume or continue operations as soon as possible after disaster strikes. Additionally records that would require massive resources to reconstruct should be protected. Offsite document storage can safely house critical business records in an organized fashion. If the disaster impacts your physical facility, there is great benefit in these having these essential records safeguarded in a record center.