The Hurricane Season IT Checklist for Northeast Florida Businesses
What to have in place before a storm is named, what to do in the 72 hours before landfall, and how to come back online after
The most important thing to understand about hurricane IT preparedness is the timing. Almost everything on this list has to be done before a storm exists. Once a named storm is in the Gulf or off the coast, you are in the 72-hour window, and the options shrink fast. You cannot migrate a server to the cloud in three days. You cannot build a backup history that does not exist. You cannot set up remote access for a team that has never used it while everyone is also boarding windows and filling gas tanks.
So this post is organized the way the problem actually works: what to do now, while the weather is clear. What to do when a storm is approaching. And what to do after it passes.
Phase 1: What to Have in Place Before a Storm Exists
This is the phase that determines everything else. A business that handles this section well can treat an approaching storm as an inconvenience. A business that skips it is gambling every season.
Know Where Your Data Actually Lives
Start with an honest inventory. For every system your business depends on, answer one question: if the office building were inaccessible for two weeks, would this still work?
Email hosted in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace keeps working no matter what happens to your building. An accounting system running on a server in the back room does not. Files in OneDrive or SharePoint are reachable from anywhere. Files on a local file server are reachable only if that server has power, internet, and a dry room to sit in.
Most Northeast Florida businesses are somewhere in the middle: partly cloud, partly on-premise, and often unsure which parts are which. Getting this mapped is the foundation for every other decision. If critical systems are still tied to physical hardware in your office, hurricane season is the reason to seriously evaluate moving them, and the off season is the time to actually do it.
Get Backups Offsite and Out of the Region
A backup drive sitting on top of the server it protects is not hurricane preparedness. It is a second copy of the same risk. If the building floods, both copies are gone. If a power surge takes out the rack, both copies are gone.
Hurricane-ready backups have two properties. They are offsite, meaning physically separate from your production systems. And they are out of the region, meaning stored in a data center that is not also in the path of the same storm. Cloud backup services handle both automatically, replicating your data to facilities hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Just as important: backups have to be verified. A backup job that has been silently failing since March is worthless in September. Someone should be checking completion status regularly and performing test restores on a schedule to confirm the data actually comes back.
Make Sure Your Team Can Work Remotely
After a major storm, the question is rarely “is the office destroyed.” It is usually “the office has no power or internet for five days, now what?” Businesses with remote work capability keep operating from homes, hotels, and relatives’ houses in Georgia. Businesses without it simply stop.
Remote capability means a few specific things. Laptops instead of desktops for key staff, or at least for the people who keep the business running. Cloud-based phone service that can ring to cell phones when the office line is down. Access to files and applications that does not require being on the office network, or a secure VPN if it does. And critically, all of this tested in advance. The first time an employee uses remote access should not be during a disaster.
Document the Plan and the Contacts
When a storm is approaching, nobody thinks clearly. The plan has to exist on paper before it is needed, and it has to live somewhere that is not only on a server in the office.
- A written shutdown procedure: what gets powered off, in what order, and who does it
- A contact list for all employees, your IT provider, your internet provider, your insurance agent, and key vendors, stored in the cloud and printed
- Documentation of your systems: what you have, where it is, and how to reach it, so recovery does not depend on one person’s memory
- Insurance policy details and photos of your equipment and office, updated each season, for claims purposes
- An agreed communication method for the team if email is down, such as a group text thread established in advance
Phase 2: The 72-Hour Window Before Landfall
A storm is named, the cone includes Northeast Florida, and landfall is projected within a few days. If Phase 1 is done, this phase is calm and procedural. Here is the sequence.
Confirm your most recent backups completed successfully and run a fresh manual backup of critical systems. Verify you can access cloud systems from a device outside the office. Confirm employees know the remote work plan and have taken laptops and chargers home. Charge everything.
Update and confirm the emergency contact list. Forward office phones to cell phones or confirm your cloud phone system’s failover is configured. Photograph equipment and office spaces for insurance documentation. Confirm your IT provider’s storm procedures and after-storm contact method.
Perform a clean shutdown of on-premise servers and network equipment. A controlled shutdown protects hardware from the power surges and repeated outages that come with a storm, which do more damage than a clean power loss. Unplug equipment from wall power. Elevate anything on the floor: servers, UPS units, power strips. Move equipment away from windows.
The instinct is to leave servers running as long as possible. The math says otherwise. Storm-related power problems arrive before the storm does: surges, brownouts, and rapid outage cycles that can corrupt data and damage hardware mid-write. A server that was shut down cleanly on purpose comes back up reliably. A server that lost power mid-operation sometimes does not. Losing a few hours of uptime is cheap insurance.
Phase 3: After the Storm
The storm has passed, the roads are open, and you can get to the office. Resist the urge to walk in and turn everything on. Recovery has an order.
Assess Before You Power Anything On
Check for water intrusion first. If there is any evidence of flooding or roof leaks near your equipment, do not power it on. Water-damaged electronics that get powered up are often destroyed in that moment, taking data with them; equipment that stays off can frequently have data recovered professionally. Check the server room, check above the racks, check the floor.
Verify power quality before reconnecting equipment. After a storm, utility power can be unstable for days, with surges and dropouts as crews restore the grid. If your area is on generator power or experiencing flickering, wait or run only what is protected by a quality UPS.
Bring Systems Back in Order
Network equipment first: modem, firewall, switches. Confirm internet connectivity. Then servers, one at a time, confirming each is healthy before starting the next. Then workstations. Then verify the things the business actually depends on: can you receive email, can you access files, does the accounting system open, do the phones ring.
Confirm Backups Resume
After any shutdown event, verify that backup jobs have resumed and are completing. This is one of the most commonly missed steps in post-storm recovery. Systems come back online, everyone returns to work, and nobody notices that the backup schedule broke during the shutdown until the next crisis reveals it.
The Mistake Almost Everyone Makes
The pattern we see every year: hurricane season starts June 1, nothing happens for a while, and preparation stays on the someday list. Then a storm forms, the cone shows up on the news, and the calls start. Can we move our server to the cloud this week? Can we set up remote access by Friday? Can we get backups going before landfall?
Some of that can be rushed. Most of it cannot. A cloud migration takes planning and testing. A backup strategy needs time to build history and prove itself. Remote work capability needs to be configured and rehearsed. The businesses that ride out storms without drama are the ones that treated preparation as an off-season project rather than a forecast-week scramble.
Northeast Florida gets a reminder of this almost every year. The reminder is free. Acting on it before the next one is the whole game.