How to prepare your business for unexpected winter storms.

As winter approaches, every business owner should make business continuity a priority. The exercise of building and testing a plan will help your business thrive should the unthinkable happen.

According to the 2013 Quorum Disaster Recovery Report, natural disasters typically make up only 5 percent of the outages that can affect a small business. Man-made disasters such as hardware failure (55 percent), generic human errors (22 percent), and software failures (18 percent) are the real culprits that can bring your business and your livelihood to its knees.

Whether snow and ice storms close the office for extended periods, or your hard drive fails, the result is the same employees are unable to perform their jobs. According to an HP report titled Impact on US Small Business of Natural and Man-Made Disasters, 70 percent of small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year. The same report states: 75 percent of companies without business continuity plans fail within three years of a disaster.

How do you avoid that fate?

Assess your business: Identify the critical components necessary for you to carry on at full or partial strength. Can you set up a temporary shop in your home or work in the storeroom of a friendly neighbor or business associate? Can you run your business with only mobile phones? How are your clients going to reach you or find you? Can you access the data that is most important for getting your business back up and running?

Implement changes: Ensure critical processes, communications, and data elements are properly protected and easily replicable. Does your phone system allow for remote access to redirect calls? Do you have a list of your clients that you can use to let them know where you are and how to get in touch with you? Is all of your data backed up and recoverable in a fashion that it can be brought up and accessed in a new location with minimum disruption?

Test your plan: Its important that your remote desktop capabilities work when the office is closed for inclement weather. Likewise, if your premises are robbed and all of your hardware is stolen (including that external hard drive to which you were backing up your server), you dont want to find out that the remote cloud backup of your server image has not been working as you thought.

About the author:

Jeff Steele is President of Seattle-based CMIT Solutions, which offers a broad menu of technical support and IT services that help your small business run smoothly and prepare for anything, including inclement weather.