Secure your business data before hurricane season hits

June 1, 2019 should be circled on the calendar of every business owner. Why? June 1 marks the start of hurricane season, and preparations should be made in advance of that date to protect a business’s most important assets.

What are a business’s most important assets?

If you ask a business owner what their most important assets are, hopefully they would answer their employees. Employees are the very definition of irreplaceable and the most effort should go into protecting them during hurricane season.

But if a business owner starts to list the next most important assets as their office space or equipment, that’s where they’d be wrong. Next to people, data is the most important thing to protect in inclement weather. Critical data is what keeps businesses in operation. The potentially irreparable damage to records, documents, film and electronic media could set your business operations back weeks or months, or even end operations altogether.

What is the best way to protect data?

Here’s the problem with the way most businesses protect their data. They backup their data on a hard drive or make physical copies and store all of this in their building’s storage closet, which can just as easily be damaged by the wind and rain of hurricanes.

The best solution is simple: take your data offsite. Data can only be secure if it is in a secure building—a building that is engineered to withstand all that a hurricane can dish out. Bringing your data offsite should involve both scanning and saving of physical documents, and backing up of digital data onto hard drives. Companies who rely predominantly on paper-driven processes should take advantage of this time to scan their documents to ensure they will remain in good condition come hurricane season.

How can I know my data will actually be safe offsite?

Even if your records storage area is safe from hurricane floods in an offsite building, if it’s not temperature-controlled, information can be distorted and become unreadable over time. This means it’s absolutely necessary to choose a document management company with facilities designed for safe and secure preservation of your critical business documents.

The facilities at Stevens & Stevens Business Records Management have fully redundant backup power, designed to withstand wind speeds of up to 150 mph with temperature and humidity-controlled media vaults. You can learn more about all the ways we’ll keep your business data safe during hurricane season here.