Business Continuity Lessons Learned From Texas’ Winter Storm

It’s not a big surprise that many Texas businesses who didn’t consider business continuity something to focus on have changed their minds after surviving February’s winter storm. If you didn’t have a disaster plan in place, now is the time to develop one before you need it.

Texas’ Winter Storm Did Major Damage to Businesses

Recent estimates suggest there were nearly 4.5 million Texas homes and businesses without power, many for days. Not only were companies out of power, many suffered infrastructure damage due to frozen pipes breaking and dumping water into their buildings. No power, freezing temperatures, water, and technology don’t mix.

If you had to design a worst-case scenario regarding your business’ technology, there isn’t much worse than water damage. Without a proper backup and disaster recovery plan, physical damage to your IT infrastructure can lead to massive costs and downtime, as well as data loss. Major data loss events can be so crippling to a business that suffering from one can lead to the end of said business. That’s why your backup solution needs to be more than just a copy of your data on an extra hard drive—you need business continuity.

What is Business Continuity?

The term business continuity originally referred to the processes an organization develops in case of the death or loss of a team's principal member. Today, business continuity is designed to provide a path for the business to follow after a critical event. A well-developed business continuity plan realizes that a critical event must include any type of event, and covers just about any major disruption of business with the sole purpose of keeping the doors open. These events can vary from a cyberattack to a natural disaster or any event that jeopardizes your business' long-term survival.

Why is Business Continuity Taking the Front Stage?

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to many that the magnitude of this storm and the damage left in its wake was unexpected. Unfortunately, it often takes a crisis to put into focus the shortcomings in business models. In the case of many Texas businesses, the lack of a business continuity plan put these shortcomings into clear relief, as companies struggled to regain their footing.

Many Texas businesses discovered the “what if,” had become the “what now?” in the aftermath of the storm. Many companies found themselves with no power, no ability to gain access to their data, or even communicate with their team or customers. In these cases, there was little to be done except ride out the storm. 

Suppose your business was affected by the recent winter storm. In that case, you have two choices: continue the status quo and hope that another “once in a lifetime” storm doesn’t happen again in your lifetime, or treat this event as a learning experience to keep your business safe. The most effective way to disaster-proof your business is with a business continuity plan.

What Should a Business Continuity Plan Entail?

When developing a business continuity plan, you should account for the following areas of concern:

• Cyberattacks
• Sabotage or user error
• Power outages
• Hardware failure
• Sickness or death of team members
• Natural disasters
• Fire, flood, electrical damage

When we consider Texas' events, we can quickly see how many areas a business continuity plan would have benefited most businesses temporarily unable to operate. Moreover, a business continuity plan may have prevented any company that had to close from doing so. 

It should be evident that businesses should seek to do more than recover from a disaster; they should strive to prevent it from closing their business in the first place. In today’s 24/7 business environment, you need to be able to operate through a disaster, and business continuity is the tool to allow you to do so.

Does Your Business Have a Business Continuity Plan In Place?

Capstone Works managed IT services offer a wide range of solutions to develop a business continuity plan designed for your business' unique needs. If your organization struggled to get back on track during these trying times, it's time to develop a recovery plan to get your business up and running as soon as possible when the next crisis occurs. 

If you don't have a business continuity plan in place, you need to have one. If you have learned anything from this recent crisis, it should be how fragile the support systems your company relies on are. Now's the time to take business continuity seriously because if not now, then when? If your business survived this event, was it due to blind luck or good planning?  

It’s About Rapid Recovery

Ever take a day off and come back feeling like you need to spend a full day just getting caught up? Imagine multiplying that for every employee you have in your organization. That’s a full day of downtime, and it comes with a lot of stress and agita. It’s expensive too. If your business was without power for several days back in February, you get what I mean.

A huge part of business continuity is being able to get back to the status quo as quickly as possible, and if you have to wait on new server equipment to get delivered, or wait days for your backups to be restored, it’s only going to put you further behind.

When we help a business with its continuity, our biggest role is data backup. If you can’t get to your data, you might as well still be closed. We only consider data to be truly backed up if you can access it all easily, without wasting tons of time. With our backup solutions, you can always access your backup securely from the cloud, or in an extreme situation, we can restore your backup onto a device and overnight it from our data center if you need to set up a temporary office after a major disaster. We’ve carefully thought through hundreds of disaster scenarios and made sure that our backup solution is the most responsive solution available.

Don't rely on luck for your business' survival. Call Capstone Works today at (512) 343-8891  to schedule an appointment because luck always runs out.