Why Hurricane Season Puts Your Business at Risk—And How to Prepare
The Atlantic Hurricane Season officially began on June 1, 2025, and forecasters are already predicting an intense year. With above-average storm activity and warmer ocean temperatures in the Gulf and Atlantic, the risk to coastal regions is high.
But the heightened hurricane alert isn’t just for homeowners or emergency managers. For business leaders across North America—especially those with offices, vendors, or clients in hurricane-prone areas—the season provides an opportunity for action.
Hurricanes don’t just damage buildings and flood roads. They knock out power grids, disrupt cloud connectivity, destroy on-site servers, and open the door for opportunistic cybercriminals who thrive on chaos. And these threats extend far beyond coastal regions—ask anyone who was impacted by Hurricane Helene’s devastation in the Appalachian Mountains last year.
The Real Cost of Hurricanes to Business
Storm season represents a major risk to technology, IT infrastructure, and day-to-day business operations. And now is the time to prepare for it.
In 2022, Hurricane Ian caused more than $112 billion in damage, including weeks-long power outages and widespread digital disruptions across Florida and the Carolinas. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston with more than 50 inches of rain, crippling critical infrastructure. Many businesses—especially small and medium-sized ones—never fully recovered.
The numbers tell the story:
- According to FEMA, 60% of small businesses never reopen after a major disaster
- According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is between $5,600 and $9,000 per minute
- According to IBM’s 2024 Cyber Resiliency Report, 45% of businesses hit by a natural disaster experience a related cybersecurity incident within two weeks
That goes far beyond water damage, extending to data loss, operational breakdowns, and reputational harm. Without a strong IT response plan in place, post-hurricane recovery is exponentially more difficult.
How Storms Can Hit Your Business Hard
Even if your physical office survives a storm, your technology might not. These are a few of the weak spots that hurricanes expose:
- Power outage. Sudden loss of electricity can destroy data, damage equipment, and interrupt backups. Prolonged blackouts—especially when paired with voltage surges during restoration—can fry sensitive electronics and render critical systems inoperable. Even battery backups only offer a temporary solution if not paired with a broader continuity plan.
- Local hardware damage. On-site servers or physical devices in low-lying areas are especially vulnerable to flooding or wind damage. Small businesses with back offices or server rooms located in basements, for instance, may suffer catastrophic data loss if those machines are submerged or shorted out by water intrusion.
- Connectivity interruptions. Without reliable internet or VoIP systems, internal teams and external clients can be disconnected. This disruption can halt sales, freeze customer service, and leave employees without access to cloud-based tools—all while competitors who stayed online move ahead.
- Delayed detection. When disaster strikes, monitoring gaps and staff distractions can allow threats to go unnoticed. If your firewall goes down or an unauthorized login happens during the chaos, you may not find out until it’s too late to stop the damage.
- Opportunistic cyberattacks. Hackers almost always exploit post-storm confusion, sending fake emergency alerts, phishing for credentials, or using ransomware to target weakened systems. In recent years, post-disaster phishing emails pretending to be from FEMA or insurance companies have deceived users into divulging passwords or bank details.
Hidden IT Risks That Many Businesses Miss
Natural disasters don’t always lead to immediate catastrophe. But they often reveal vulnerabilities that compound over time. These include:
- Incomplete backups. Many businesses believe they’re covered—until they try restoring data that wasn’t fully synced. It’s easy to assume that cloud tools like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace will back up everything automatically, but without intentional backup policies, deleted or corrupted files may be lost permanently.
- Cloud misconfigurations. The rush to the cloud has left some companies exposed, with weak access controls or unprotected databases. Absent multi-factor authentication or IP restrictions, unauthorized users—or even bad actors exploiting known vulnerabilities—can gain entry during a moment of disruption.
- Vendor gaps. If a third-party provider goes down, your operations may grind to a halt. Businesses often overlook how dependent they are on external software vendors, payment processors, and trusted managed service providers until one link in the chain fails during a storm.
- Security lapses. Employees working remotely during or after a natural disaster may skip VPNs or use unprotected devices, introducing new threats to the office ecosystem. Without clear policies governing BYOD (bring your own device) or remote access safeguards, one unsecured login could open up a new breach entry point.
5 Smart Disaster Recovery Moves to Make Now
You can’t stop a storm’s arrival, but you can shield your business from its most damaging effects. Here’s how:
- Back up your data. Relying on local backups introduces a major risk to your business. Invest in secure cloud-based backup solutions with end-to-end encryption and automated syncing—and test them regularly to ensure they actually work. Backups should be redundantly stored in geographically separate regions so they’re safe even if your primary location is impacted.
- Test your disaster recovery plan. Don’t just write it down—run it and see how it works. Simulate a hurricane scenario with your staff, identifying vulnerabilities, updating contact lists, and walking through recovery protocols so everyone knows their role. A plan that hasn’t been tested is just a guess—and in the middle of a disaster, guessing costs time and money.
- Reinforce your remote work setup. Ensure employees can safely work from anywhere with access to critical files, communications tools, and collaboration platforms—secured with multi-factor authentication and endpoint protection. Disruption shouldn’t mean disconnection. Instead, remote access that’s resilient and secure keeps teams productive no matter where the storm hits.
- Coordinate with your IT provider. If your managed services provider doesn’t offer 24/7 monitoring, your systems could be vulnerable. Now is the time to ensure your systems are being watched—and that help is available if disaster strikes at 2:00 AM. Real-time alerts, rapid response, and active threat mitigation can mean the difference between a minor hiccup and a major outage.
- Prepare for the next attack, not the last one. Cybercriminals evolve quickly. A disaster recovery plan written in 2021 may not account for the rise of AI-powered phishing, cloud ransomware, or hybrid attacks. Update your playbook for 2025 threats to address today’s risk environment, which is more complex and fast-moving than ever—your defenses need to match that pace.
How to Transform Hurricane Prep into IT Resilience
Hurricane readiness isn’t just about surviving the next storm. It’s about building a smarter, more secure business that thrives in any condition. Here are some of the ways CMIT Solutions helps its clients across North America to weather any storm and bounce back stronger in the wake of a disaster:
- Deploy hybrid infrastructure. Combine cloud storage, local redundancy, and mobile connectivity to ensure operational continuity from anywhere. This layered approach reduces dependency on a single point of failure, enabling your business to keep running even if one location goes offline.
- Ongoing cybersecurity measures. Layered defenses, patch management, threat detection, and strong password policies keep your business protected—even when you’re offline. Storms don’t put the brakes on cybercrime, and a network left unmonitored during a disaster is an easy target.
- Business continuity planning. Go beyond disaster recovery by mapping out how to maintain service, communication, and cash flow during a prolonged outage. Consider how billing, payroll, customer support, and compliance obligations will continue if your physical office is inaccessible.
- Proactive monitoring and response. With a trusted IT partner like CMIT Solutions, you don’t have to wait for things to break. Instead, we help you stay one step ahead of potential threats. Around-the-clock monitoring, real-time alerts, and rapid remediation ensure your systems stay online when you need them most.
Don’t Wait for a Disaster to Strike
Every year, thousands of businesses tell themselves they’ll prepare when things slow down and time allows. They’ll back up their data next week. They’ll finalize their recovery plan next quarter. They’ll think about cybersecurity after the busy season.
Then a storm hits, leaving them high and dry (or underwater and in dire straits). Don’t let that happen to you.
CMIT Solutions has spent the last 25 years helping businesses across North America weather every kind of storm—hurricanes, tornados, floods, fires, blizzards, and more. We combine local expertise with national reach to deliver trusted, proactive IT support, secure data backups, and disaster recovery planning that’s tailored to your business.
This hurricane season, preparation is protection. Let’s build a digital storm shelter together—before the clouds roll in.
Contact CMITSolutions.com to get the help you need this hurricane season.