Hurricane Preparedness for Savannah Businesses: Your IT Plan

Start with the systems your business cannot run without

NOAA's National Hurricane Center lists the official Atlantic hurricane season as June 1 to November 30, with most activity between mid-August and mid-October, and notes that storms sometimes form outside those dates. Plan in the calm months, not when a storm in the forecast reveals that the only copy of the customer database sits on a ground-floor desktop.

List what the business uses every day: email, files, accounting, scheduling or practice software, phones and payments. For each, write down where it runs (a cloud service, an office server, a single computer), who administers it, and how to reach the vendor. Then decide in plain language how long the business could operate without it and how much recent work it could afford to re-enter. Those answers set the order of everything else.

How to protect business data before a hurricane

A backup in the same building as the original protects against a failed hard drive, not against water in the office. Keep a copy outside the building, ideally with a cloud backup service or somewhere outside the region, since a drive carried home to Pooler or Richmond Hill can sit in the path of the same storm. Protect that copy with credentials separate from everyday administrator accounts.

Cloud applications need attention too. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are hosted outside your office, so they stay reachable when it is closed, but retention and recovery responsibilities vary by provider and plan, and a synchronized folder copies a deletion as faithfully as a file. Write down what each vendor protects and what the business must protect itself.

Then prove it. Restore a sample of files and at least one critical system to a different machine, confirm the results open and support real work, and record what happened. A dashboard of successful backup jobs is reassuring; a completed restore is evidence.

Keep the plan where a closed office cannot lock it away

A plan kept in a binder at the front desk or on the office server may be unreachable exactly when you need it. Store the recovery plan, system list and contact sheet in a company cloud account, with printed copies held by the owner and another key person.

The contact sheet should hold personal phone numbers for staff, plus the internet provider, phone carrier, software vendors, IT provider, insurance agent and bank, with account numbers. Keep administrator passwords in a company password manager with emergency access for more than one person, so recovery never depends on a single phone or memory.

Make sure staff can work if they evacuate

Chatham County is divided into hurricane evacuation zones A, B and C, and the Chatham Emergency Management Agency (CEMA) links to an interactive map that finds the zone for any address in the county. Look up the office and each employee's home, because they may differ. CEMA also explains that a mandatory evacuation order requires residents, visitors and businesses in the target area to evacuate, so an office there should expect to close.

Remote work only helps if it was set up beforehand: staff who need to keep working should have a company laptop, files in cloud storage rather than on a local drive, and tested access to any application on an office server. Confirm multifactor authentication works from their phones, and have each person sign in from home early in the season. Set up forwarding for the main business number to mobile phones or hosted voicemail that can be switched on remotely.

Protect on-site equipment as a storm approaches

When a storm enters the forecast, and well before anyone needs to leave, run a final backup and confirm it completed. Shut down servers, network equipment and workstations in an orderly way, then unplug them from wall power so surges when power returns cannot reach them. A battery backup unit helps equipment ride through flickers and shut down cleanly; it is not storm protection.

Move equipment off the floor and away from windows, cover it with plastic, and photograph each device and its serial number for insurance. Laptops leave with the people who use them, along with their chargers.

Communicate with staff and customers during the storm

Decide in advance who sends updates to staff, through which channel, and how people confirm they are able to work. A text group or personal email list does not depend on office systems. Encourage employees to register for CEMA Alerts and to take instructions from state and local officials rather than secondhand reports.

For customers, write short messages in calm weather: a website notice, updated hours on your business listings, an email auto-reply and a voicemail greeting that explain how to reach you and where updates will appear. Then nobody has to compose them from an evacuation route.

Returning to the office after a hurricane

Getting back in can take longer than the storm. According to CEMA, re-entry after an evacuation is managed in phases by the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency (GEMA/HS), using the same process statewide. Business owners return with residents in a later phase whose timing depends on the damage, access may be limited to daylight hours, and passes for earlier access must be requested before a storm. Plan to keep operating remotely until then.

Once the building is open to you, check equipment before powering anything up. Have anything that took on water or sat in a damp room inspected by a qualified technician first. Confirm power is stable and the internet connection works, then bring systems back in the order your plan sets: network and sign-in first, then the applications the business needs most.

Verify restored data with the people who use it. While the experience is fresh, review what worked and what slowed the business down, and update the plan before the next storm.

Where a Coastal Georgia business should start

If your office is outside Chatham County, in Richmond Hill or Hinesville for example, follow your own county's emergency management agency and GEMA/HS. The technology steps above stay the same.

If you would like help putting this in place, the free Business Technology & AI Assessment is a practical starting point. F09 Tech can help map recovery priorities, review backups and remote access, run a restore test, and document a runbook your team can follow.