The Dallas Morning News:
There’s a brush fire bearing down on your business. You have one hour to evacuate — which means you have one hour to execute a disaster preparation plan.
This is a scenario similar to what thousands of small business owners face each year. Luckily, that’s enough time to take care of a company’s most valuable assets — its employees and its data.
Disaster prep is one of those tasks that many small-business owners keep putting off.
While it’s understandable that some owners don’t get around to disaster planning, they’re courting danger.
“This is wrath-of-God stuff,” said John Toigo, a disaster recovery consultant based in Dunedin, Fla.
Minimal preparation — the kind you’d have to resort to if a disaster were in fact on the way — can be accomplished in an hour. And you can do much more if you have an entire day.
Toigo said the first thing to be done is to put together a list of contact phone numbers and physical and e-mail addresses for everyone on the staff, and to be sure everyone has a copy.
Luis Yepez, vice president of Mainstream Global, a Lawrence, Mass.-based computer reseller, said that it’s also important to know how you’re going to stay in touch with your clients, customers and vendors. They need to know your situation because what happens to you affects them.
Toigo noted that it’s easy to pop a flash drive into the USB ports of your computers and back up all your information, including customer and vendor lists, your firm’s books and inventory lists and the projects you’re working on. You can also e-mail data to a non-work address for safekeeping.
Photo by Timm Williams