Joplin, Missouri is like a barbell. Downtown retains an interesting mix of history and mid-rise offices while, several miles to the south, the medical complex and commercial corridor almost glistens with new construction. In the middle, a once-vibrant residential area known as South Joplin, is a mix of random new commercial buildings and tract homes, with its former glory wiped away, along with any hint of vegetation, by a Category Five tornado in 2011. All the infrastructure is new, but any visitor would know immediately that the previous iteration of this neighborhood had been stricken from the record.

Lousy Weather Luddite

In addition to your physical premises, you have data to think about, networks to protect, and servers to secure. Your building cannot escape danger when storms rise, but steps can be taken to see that it avoids damage. The cyber side of your business needs the tech equivalent of plywood and sandbags, because the digital bell has been rung. Much as you’d like to, your business runs on its digital footprints, and there’s no going back to pencil and paper when the grid goes down. If we can’t be tech-savvy when it suits us and a Luddite when disaster hits close to home, how can we take steps to protect our interests, physical and digital?

Spring Into Action to Protect Your Interests

Weather has no conscience and no political affiliation, and it strikes without emotion. The media likes to tell the stories of the ill-prepared. The trailer parks in tornado alley that almost evaporate, the coastal communities that disappear from the landscape, the towns swallowed by the rivers that run through them, the lives and businesses devastated.

What we don’t hear as often are the stories of businesses who developed disaster recovery plans and established alternate locations that that allowed their people and their data to continue operations in the face of natural disasters that now seem increasingly inevitable.

ICS can’t hold back the tide or stop the rain, but we can help make sure the weather doesn’t hold your business back or stop your people from setting the world on fire with your data. That’s a figure of speech, of course. Global conflagration would also be a disaster. But you know what we mean.