Hurricane Season …. Is Your Business Data Safe?

The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season started on June 1 and runs through November 30.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts a 60% chance of an above-normal season.

Is your business date safe?

Here are some tips on protecting your valuable business data in an emergency.

Job #1: Help protect your staff. Good companies look after their people come rain or shine. Sharing preparedness information with your employees can help keep them safe in uncertain times. Dealing with Weather Emergencies is Federal Trade Commission (FTC) resource that covers family emergency preparedness, financial recovery, scam spotting, and links to resources from other government agencies.

Conduct an information inventory.

While the skies are sunny, take an inventory of the data critical to your business – staff contact information, customer lists, invoices, personnel files, tax records, etc. For a home-based business, it may be a matter of one computer. For other companies, consider what’s on your network, smartphones, office desktops and laptops, and employees’ home computers. Don’t forget paper records in cabinets and file rooms. Knowing what you have and where you have it is the first step toward creating a preparedness plan.

Streamline what you retain.

To prepare for an emergency, it’s easier – and less expensive – to protect a smaller amount of data. (A sensible plan to securely dispose of electronic files and paperwork you no longer need has the additional benefit of helping your company start with security.)

Back up essential information.

We’ve all heard data disaster stories: file cabinets floating down a flooded Main Street or confidential records blown miles away by a tornado. And it doesn’t have to be weather-related. A broken pipe or a fire in the building next door can put your information at risk, too. The best preventive measure is a sound plan for

– both digitized data and paper files. Depending on the size and nature of your company, you have lots of options: flash drives, external hard drives, online back-up, and cloud storage, to name just a few.

Take special steps to secure back-up files.

A meticulously maintained back-up won’t be of much good if it’s kept in an office damaged by disaster and it could pose the risk of a data breach if off-site storage isn’t secure. So give careful thought about both how and where to maintain your back-up files. Keep your back-up up to date and consider encryption for sensitive information.

Think through how emergencies elsewhere could impact essential services.

When it comes to service providers, it really is a small world after all. That’s why a storm in Sarasota or a blizzard in Butte can impact companies across the country and around the world. Do you have contingency plans in your contracts if an outage elsewhere impacts your information operations?

For more suggestions on business disaster preparedness, click here.