Nature’s Good Side

How confident are you that that your network would survive a lightning strike or even a one-hour power outage? Let’s say you’re pretty sure you’ve got the right things in place to weather the storm. Have you tested your strategy in the last month? Year? At any point since the Reagan Administration?

You are an IT Professional, so you know the intricacies and complexities of a connected world, the death grip of IoT on the global consciousness. You appreciate the placidity of steadily blinking signal indicators and the comforting click of RJ45, just the way nature intended.

As a vital member of the organizational team, you’ve probably experienced the failure of your network and the utter chaos that ensues. Lost souls adrift in a sea of paper files and tethered phones, paddling furiously to keep up with customers and communications, apoplectic stares over mouths prophesying the end of the business world as we know it. And the network’s only been down for seven minutes.

Nature’s Bad Side

Looking way out over the hood is part of business planning, and the emerging changes in our physical world certainly play into that. Predictions are that the edges of weather will get more extreme and frequent as minor changes in ocean temperature and ozone coverage upset our very sensitive tether to this place. That means more hurricanes like Katrina and Sandy, more epic floods and intense drought, more weather that wreaks havoc and creates chaos. What sort of forecast do you see for your organization?

Bunker Up and Hunker Down

We are in the middle of a relatively calm hurricane season, a period of prediction, prognostication, and dice rolling. Weather has no conscience and no political affiliation, and it strikes without emotion. Because we do have a conscience and emotional connections, we most often hear 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 and tested their disaster recovery plans and business continuity plans that allowed their people and their data to continue operations in the face of natural disasters that now seem increasingly inevitable.

ICS plays a role in a lot of those success stories. Let’s get started on yours today.