It’s been about three weeks since Hurricane Harvey dumped over 50 inches of rain on the Greater Houston area over a four day period. Portions of Houston are still under water and will remain so for a few weeks at least. Homes and businesses that had never flooded before were devastated by the unrelenting rainfall. Today, they are shells of exposed wall studs and piles of damaged debris. Roads were impassable for days. Businesses are slowly digging out. There are multiple issues in restoring full operations – wind or water damage to buildings, inventory and equipment, as well as employees affected by the storm needing time off to find accommodations and deal with the lengthy process of rebuilding. The need for a BDR solution was emphasized over those long, rainy days.
We sat through four days of continuous heavy rain watching and waiting to see if/when the water would rise enough to come in our homes. We wondered how our small businesses were doing. But all we could do was wait. Wait for the rain to stop, wait for the roads to clear. At Executive IT Help, we were extremely fortunate to have only a little water that had seeped into the doorway and one office wall. A few of us were able to get to our office on Wednesday, five days after Hurricane Harvey introduced himself to us.
The calls from our clients started coming in immediately once the rain stopped. Several had water damage and had lost equipment. Many had employees working from home as roads were impassable. Our clients needed to get back to work and due to the systems we have in place, we were able to get our clients to a point where they could remain productive. Several of our clients are crucial to the rebuilding, so after a major storm hits, they are extremely busy. Any delay in restoring their IT means lost time and slow response for their clients – victims of the storm. We are happy to report that we were able to get all of our clients up and running almost immediately.
A catastrophic event, such as this storm is an obvious reason to have a BDR and Business Continuity plan in place. However, there are many other reasons why it is so important. At some point, all computer hardware fails. It’s a fact of life. Whether it’s from age or accident, data loss is inevitable when hardware fails, and it can cripple an SMB in a second and destroy profits just as easily. Human error, theft, data breaches/viruses can all destroy your data. This is why an effective Business Continuity Plan and Backup & Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution are essential to virtually every business today.
