On Friday, May 4, 2018 there were major power outages due to the windstorm that hit Ontario and Quebec. Power outages and road closures continued for days after the storm. Gusts of wind between 90 – 110 km/hr knocked down many hydro lines, trees, damaged thousands of homes[1], and caused 3 unfortunate deaths[2]. As of Friday evening, Toronto Hydro reported 30,000 customers without power, Hydro One reporting 126,000 customers without power[3]. Even flights were grounded at Toronto Pearson International Airport and Billy Bishop Airport. No flights were allowed to land and no flights could take off[4].

This caused huge impact for some businesses that were operating last Friday. Some businesses were forced to shut down early and close its doors to customers. Whether they had no power or had part of their roof torn off, business was impacted for the day[5][6].

Every business must prepare for the worst. Those that don’t may never fully recover from a disaster. But not all disasters are created equal. And not all businesses are at risk for every kind of disaster but as we saw here in Toronto last week, severe windstorms do happen. It’s important to have a Business Continuity Plan in place for any kind of disaster including but not limited to: flood, fire, wind or thunder storm. Last Friday’s major windstorm didn’t impact any of our customers because of the redundancy of our managed services, we had ZERO outages.

A windstorm, of course, can force a business to have to relocate all its operations temporarily or be forced to shut down a few days. Below we have outlined the 3 Key Principles of a Business Continuity Plan:

  1. Get employees involved. Business Continuity Plans only work if everyone understands them. Employees are also a great source of ideas and insights about how your business might be affected by a disaster. Business must communicate Business Continuity Plans to employees regularly.
  2. Keep customers in the loop. Customers are the lifeblood of every business. They should be treated as such even during a disaster. Alerts on the company website, email broadcasts, social media and text messages to key contacts’ mobile phones are all good ways for a business to express concern about the impact of a disaster on its customers. That level of service can even help transform a disaster into an opportunity for greater long-term customer loyalty. Collaborate with suppliers. Businesses increasingly work in tightly interdependent networks of suppliers and partners. By working collaboratively with these third parties, businesses can make themselves even more resilient and well protected against disasters large and small.
  3. Periodically test and update Business Continuity Plans. It’s not enough to formulate a plan once and put it on paper. Assumptions about a plan should be validated with real-life testing. Plans also must be updated continuously to ensure that they accommodate changes in the business’s products, services, relationships, size, geographic reach, etc.

In conclusion, data backup is not enough. Many businesses think they’re safe just because they’ve backed up their critical files. The problem is that those files depend on applications and systems to be of any use to the business. That’s why, in the event of a disaster, it’s essential to be able to run applications on-demand from virtual machines backed up in the cloud.

Feel free to Contact Us for more information.