How to Protect Equipment and Data from Natural Disasters

How to Protect Equipment and Data from Natural Disasters

Businesses, small and large, invest over $80 billion a year to protect their assets and data. While we offer cybersecurity in Miami, we know that your point of failure may not be due to malicious attacks.

Natural disasters are a growing concern and include:

  • Flooding
  • Fires
  • Earthquakes
  • Tornadoes
  • Hurricanes

If you’re hiring cybersecurity companies in Miami and only looking at ways to keep attackers out of your systems, you’re leaving your company vulnerable to the risks that natural disasters pose.

Protecting Your Data and Equipment from Natural Disasters

One single backup solution will not safeguard your business from natural disasters. You need to take a multi-pronged approach to protecting your data and business continuity:

Off-Site Backups

Floods, fires and other natural disasters often cause you to lose data at one main point of storage. For example, you may have a data center in Florida that hosts all of your data. If a hurricane hits, it will impact operations.

Major corporations do a few things:

  • Create redundancy systems that replicate data across data centers
  • Backup systems on the cloud, including databases, to keep data consistent

You should keep off-site backups, ideally outside of one region. For example, if you have your main data center in Miami, you may want to have another backup stored in Texas and California.

Why?

If your backup is close to the main data center, it will also be impacted by the natural disaster.

Off-site backups can quickly be performed on the cloud and offer protection from natural disasters and equipment failure.

Power Backup Systems

Houston’s recent two-week power outages show the reason for companies having their own power backup systems. Generators and uninterruptable power supplies will allow you to transfer data from one of your main centers to another.

Business interruptions are often a result of power outages, so you should have redundancies in these areas, too.

Create a Disaster Recovery Plan

Disaster planning requires a plan. Your IT and security team must be ready for the task ahead and have a plan to:

  • Restore systems
  • Create virtual environments
  • Fall back to other systems
  • Retrieve your data

Strict planning and testing will empower you to recover from natural disasters faster. A non-tested plan leaves too much at risk and puts your business in jeopardy of failure.

Your emergency backup plan should be created at this same time to:

  • Identify crucial assets that are at risk 
  • Consider possible disasters in your area
  • Plan to protect your assets, such as fireproofing data centers
  • Create an emergency plan for employees, outlining how to keep them safe and the tasks that they need to complete
  • Develop a multi-point backup system to protect all internal data

If you have specialized equipment that cannot be easily replaced, consider storing backups of this equipment at another secure location to bring operations back up as quickly as possible.

Planning and testing for disasters are the best way to protect against business interruption and data loss.

Need help protecting your equipment and data from natural disasters? We can help you create a plan that maximizes your business’s protection against potential disruption, data breaches and downtime.