There is a version of this newsletter that opens with a hurricane checklist. Business continuity planning Wilmington businesses need is different — it goes much deeper than a pre-storm checklist. I am not going to write that one.
Instead, I want to tell you about two businesses that had a very bad week, and neither of them lost a single shingle.
When Business Continuity Planning Wilmington Is Really Tested
In January 2014, a storage tank at a chemical facility in Charleston, West Virginia, ruptured and spilled into the Elk River, about a mile upstream from the water treatment plant serving nine counties. By the next morning, 300,000 people were under a do-not-use order for tap water. Schools closed. Restaurants closed. About 8,000 businesses shut down. Nobody had a plan for that, because there was no hurricane. There was just a tank nobody was watching, and then there was a crisis.
Similarly, last month, over Memorial Day weekend, a storage tank at an aerospace plant in Garden Grove, California, overheated and began venting a highly flammable chemical into the surrounding neighborhood. Fifty thousand residents were placed under evacuation orders. Businesses locked their doors for days with no clear timeline for return. Nobody saw that coming either.
The Real Problem Is Not the Hurricane
Here in Wilmington, we do get a warning. The National Hurricane Center gives us a cone, a timeline, a named storm. And we still find ourselves scrambling. That tells you something important: the problem was never the hurricane. The problem is the week your office is unavailable, and the question of whether your business can function anyway.
Power outages, water shutdowns, mandatory evacuations, a gas leak on your block, a fire in the building next door. The cause changes. However, the result is the same. Your people cannot get in, or the building cannot be used, and your business has to keep moving regardless.
What Most Businesses Get Wrong About Business Continuity Planning Wilmington
Most businesses I talk to have thought about this in terms of the physical space. They have generators, they have a plan for the equipment, they know which documents to grab on the way out. What they have not done is rank their actual dependencies. If your team could not access the office tomorrow morning, what would hurt most? Not eventually, not after a few calls. Tomorrow.
Email and phones are often fine. Furthermore, files are where it gets complicated. Line of business applications, the software your billing runs through, the system your staff logs into for scheduling or records, those are the things that strand people. And in most small businesses, at least one of those things is sitting on a server in the back room.
Build Your Business Continuity Planning Wilmington Businesses Deserve
A continuity plan built around disaster type is the wrong tool. In contrast, a plan built around what you cannot afford to lose, and what it would take to keep those things running from anywhere, is the right one. The ranking is the hard part, and it is also the most useful thing you can do before something forces the issue.
That is exactly the kind of conversation to have before a bad week arrives. Therefore, if you are not sure where to start, rank the services your business depends on and begin with the one that would hurt most if it disappeared for a day. That single exercise tells you where your plan needs to exist first.
If you would like help thinking it through, I am easy to reach. (910) 444-0594 or dusher@cmitsolutions.com.
Until next time, keep IT simple.
Dave
If you want to go deeper on this topic, a few reads worth your time:
Safeguarding Your Business with IT Disaster Preparedness
How to Protect Computers and Technology from Natural Disasters
