Managed IT · Storm season
A timeline-based IT plan for Florida and Gulf Coast businesses: what to set up before the season, at the watch, at the warning and after landfall.
Set up before June 1
Act on the watch
Recover in the right order
30 minutes of data collection, your report the next day, yours to keep with no obligation. Or pick a time now. Or call 954-539-5678.
A hurricane preparedness plan for business has to protect people first, then data, then the ability to keep working from somewhere else. On the IT side that means five things: backups stored outside the storm area, critical systems running in the cloud or able to move there, laptops and remote access ready for staff to work from home or another city, a way to reach staff and customers when email and office phones are down, and a written order for bringing systems back after the storm.
The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30, according to NOAA’s National Hurricane Center. The work below is organized by timeline, so you know what to finish before the season and what to do once a watch or warning is issued. This plan covers technology; pair it with your building, safety and insurance plans.
Almost everything that matters is done weeks before a storm forms.
Ready.gov’s hurricane guidance and the National Hurricane Center’s preparedness pages cover personal safety and evacuation. Staff safety comes before any of these steps.
Not sure your backups and recovery plan would survive a direct hit? Our free Technology Health Assessment takes about 30 minutes of data collection. The next day you get a plain-language report rating your IT operations, cybersecurity, applications, integration, automation, AI opportunities, technology spending and business continuity, with a short list of next steps in order. It is yours to keep, with no obligation. Book your assessment.
The SBA’s emergency preparedness guide and its disaster loan program may help with recovery costs; check eligibility directly with the SBA.
Businesses in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee often assume hurricanes are a coastal problem. Storms that weaken over land still bring flooding, fallen trees and power and internet outages that can last days, far from the coast. If you have an inland office, the same plan applies, with more weight on power, internet redundancy and remote work than on storm surge. Multi-location businesses should make sure each site can cover for the other.
Email, files and SaaS apps keep running. Staff need only power, internet and a laptop. This is the simplest position to be in.
Servers are backed up to the cloud and can be restored there as virtual machines if the office is down. Test the restore time before relying on it.
Critical servers run in a data center outside the hurricane zone. Higher cost, but the office becomes far less critical.
JLB USA provides managed IT for businesses with roughly 25 to 100 employees, including monitored backups, tested restores and a written recovery plan. We support Florida businesses remotely; on-site IT is available only in Atlanta, Birmingham and Chattanooga. For backup design in detail, see our backup and disaster recovery guide. If your website must stay up through a storm, our hosting includes constant automated monitoring.
Book it now
Choose a slot that suits you. We’ll confirm by email, collect the data with you on the call, and send your report the next day. It’s free, and the report is yours to keep with no obligation.
Prefer to talk first? Call 954-539-5678, or send the form and we’ll contact you.
Before June 1, when the Atlantic hurricane season starts. Most of the useful work, such as off-site backups and remote work testing, cannot be done in the 48 hours before a storm.
If flooding or a long power outage is likely, shut them down cleanly and unplug them after a verified backup, following your documented order. Do not power on equipment that got wet.
At least one copy should be outside the storm region, such as a cloud region or data center far from the coast. A drive in the same building is not enough.
Use a cloud phone system or carrier forwarding that can be changed from a web portal, so main lines ring on mobiles or another office.
Fraud and phishing, including fake invoices and vendor impersonation, along with damaged equipment and data loss. Verify payment changes by phone using a known number.
