When I wrote about preparing your family and your home for the various kinds of emergencies and catastrophes that can befall us, I surely had no idea the subject would suddenly become so topical. Again. We’ve seen, time and again, the danger and heartache that a natural disaster brings to individuals, families, and homeowners. But what about business owners and leaders? What can you do to prepare your business for disaster?
Some business entrepreneurs have been there before us and can offer some advice. Forbes contributor Elaine Pofeldt, for example, lists some wish-I’d-thought-of-this preparations that would have helped get her own and her husband’s home-based businesses through Hurricane Sandy:
• generator
• car charger for laptops
• back-up Internet service
• printed list of hotels in nearby states
• bicycle at the ready.
If your business has outgrown a room in the back of the house and is an established, brick-and-mortar retail store, wholesale operation, or service office, your planning issues are more complex and more crucial to the business’s survival. Some 25 percent of small businesses are unable to come back after a natural disaster, largely because they are unprepared. A December 2012 survey showed that 74 percent of businesses have no disaster plan, 84 percent have no natural disaster insurance, and a third have no idea how quickly they could get back in operation after a natural disaster.
Experts urge the importance of several coordinating strategies. These include
• having a disaster recovery plan in place;
• migrating IT functions, data, applications, and processes to the Cloud;
• developing a back-up communication system that does not rely on cell phones;
• and anticipating ways to help restore normalcy to employees whose lives are upended.
Clearly, a crucial strategy is to move data and computer functions off-site, to a secure site in the Cloud. This should include not only archived records and programs, but all work in progress. Not only will this protect your company’s and your clients’ data, it can make it possible for employees to work remotely, in case they can’t get to the office or the office itself is out of commission.
The Pacific County (Washington) Economic Development Council has posted an excellent and broad-ranging series of guides and checklists for business preparedness, in connection with a conference on the subject. If you own a business or are in charge of preparedness at your workplace, this is an invaluable series of resources. While you’re at this site, click on the “Business Planning Document” link at the top of the page. This will load a Word document containing a full business preparedness plan whose purpose is “to allow the company to resume mission critical operations within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, followed by the resumption of all other company operations within three to five days.”
Financial Services Group PNC adds the suggestion that business managers identify their organization’s most vulnerable points — computers located on a first floor vulnerable to flooding, for example — and take action to remedy those situations before the fact.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has published several pages of useful information at its website, including a set of planning and implementation guides for businesses. Also on these pages you can find suggestions for building emergency kits, either for families or for businesses, and descriptions of various kinds of hazards and how to prepare for them. Another FEMA document, “Every Business Should Have a Plan,” provides a succinct set of recommendations for preparations to help to keep your employees safe during an emergency and help your company stay in business afterward.
There are actually two aspects to disaster preparedness: readying oneself and one’s group for natural disasters and preparing for manmade disasters and catastrophic human error. Quite a lot of information addresses the possibility of natural events such as earthquakes, tornadoes, fire, and floods, but there’s less public information about preparing for a terrorist attack. Probably the best organized and most useful discussion appears at FEMA’s site on terrorist hazards. There you’ll find links to pages with details on protecting yourself from biological and chemical threats, cyberattacks, explosions, nuclear blasts, and radioactive dispersion devices.
Another of the best planning documents designed to help businesses cope with manmade disasters is a primer published by Business Executives for National Security. This guide covers the several possible kinds of terrorist attacks, risk assessment and preparation, employee training, terrorism insurance, ways a business can respond to a terrorist attack, and recovery. It includes a short, to-the-point checklist.
In the recovery department, the Small Business Administration offers a variety of business physical recovery loans for companies in a declared disaster zone.
Palm Beach County (Florida) provides a business guide for disaster preparedness that also addresses bomb threats, enraged employees or customers, sabotage, cyberterrorism, and hacking. And King County (Washington) publishes a short and to-the-point set of actions to take in various scenarios, ranging from hazard recognition to survival if you’re trapped under debris.
The Red Cross has a PDF on responding to terrorist attacks; it contains some helpful advice, including instructions for sheltering in place.
In 2003, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) prepared an eye-opening report on potential terrorist actions and the nation’s preparedness for them. A key part of this discussion has to do with the threat to financial markets posed by a successful, major attack. We saw what happened when some joker hacked in to the Associated Press’s Twitter feed and posted a report that the White House had been struck — an instantaneous, deep stock market dip. Had the report been real, the consequences would have been very serious, indeed. The GAO report deals largely with the financial markets, the banking industry, and the telecommunications infrastructure. Even though it’s a decade old, the report and its recommendations are still worth a business executive’s attention.
Images:
Tornado in central Oklahoma, 1999. U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Public domain.
King David Hotel (Jerusalem) after attack by Irgun, 1946. Public domain.
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