The Hurricane Season IT Checklist Every Tampa Bay Business Needs
Hurricane season runs June 1 through November 30, and if you're reading this from Tampa Bay, you already know the drill for your home: water, batteries, gas, shutters. Most businesses, though, have no equivalent plan for their data, phones, and payroll. The generator keeps the lights on; it does nothing for a server sitting in two feet of water.
Before the storm: do this now, in June#
Test a real restore. Don't check that backups are running; actually restore a folder and open the files. A backup you've never restored is a hope, not a plan.
Get one copy out of the building. Cloud backup or a rotated offsite drive. Out of the flood zone entirely is the goal.
Build an offline access kit. Critical logins in a password manager with emergency access, plus printed contact sheets for staff, vendors, insurer, and your IT provider.
Photograph your equipment. Serial numbers and room shots make insurance claims dramatically faster.
Test phone failover. If you use VoIP, confirm calls can forward to mobiles when the office is dark. Practice the switch once.
Name a communications owner. One person updates staff, one channel updates customers. Decide this before the cone shows up.
The 3-2-1 rule in plain English#
Every continuity plan stands on the same three-legged stool:
3 copies of your data (production plus two backups)
2 different types of storage (for example, local appliance plus cloud)
1 copy offsite, ideally immutable so nothing and no one can alter it
When a storm gets a name#
Run a final backup and verify it completed, then shut servers down gracefully. A clean shutdown beats a power-loss crash every time.
Get hardware off the floor. Desks beat floors; second story beats first.
Unplug from the wall. Surges during restoration kill more equipment than the storm itself.
Turn on call forwarding and your out-of-office plan before you leave, not after.
After the storm#
Never power on equipment that may have gotten wet. Water damage plus electricity turns a recoverable drive into e-waste.
Have your IT team verify the environment before staff reconnect. Looters aren't the only ones who exploit a disaster; phishing spikes after every named storm.
Restore in priority order: communications first, then billing, then everything else.
Two numbers every owner should know#
Term | Plain English | Ask yourself |
|---|---|---|
RTO | How fast you're back up | How many hours can we afford to be down? |
RPO | How much work you lose | If we roll back to last night, what disappears? |
If you can't answer both questions with a number, that's the gap to close before September, which is historically the most active month of the season.
We're fully in the cloud. Are we covered?
Mostly, and that's a great position. But your laptops, internet connection, and power are still local. Confirm staff can work from home or a backup location, that cloud files sync to more than one device, and that someone can manage phones and DNS from outside the office.
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