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What do you do when your organization is staring down a natural disaster that could shut down operations for weeks—if not months?
It’s increasingly not an academic question for the tech industry. With thousands of companies and manufacturing plants in the path of major storms, whether in the US or abroad, the consequences of the weather events can be far-reaching.
Florida, man. Hurricane Milton, the massive storm that hit Florida Oct. 9, showed the disruption that even the threat of a major event can have. Though Milton didn’t have the impact that it was feared to—Tampa wasn’t inundated with up to 12 feet of storm surge, for example—the high winds and torrential rain were enough to provoke moves on the part of Florida-based companies to cover the potential disruption.
With around 38,000 tech companies in the state, a storm like Milton will naturally have an effect on how they manage their responsibilities—though, as ThreatLocker CEO and co-founder Danny Jenkins told Tech Informed, there are precautions being taken.
“We’ve relocated key staff out of state to ensure full Managed Detection and Response services remain operational,” Jenkins said. “Our Orlando data centers, rated for Category 5 hurricanes, are supported by backup facilities to cover any potential outages.”
Verify it. Then there are the potential changes to identity verification that can come with forced departure, Saviynt Chief Trust Officer Jim Routh told IT Brew in an email.
“Enterprises with geo-location settings used for authentication validation purposes should adjust their models to acknowledge those employees forced to evacuate their home,” Routh wrote.
On the other hand, as Vim CISO Nandy Vaisman told IT Brew, the decentralization of operations—increased since the pandemic—can make it easier for companies to manage disasters. With data centers off site and remote employees, having your organization’s base in one state doesn’t necessarily mean that all your operations will be based there too.
“I would hope that most organizations these days would realize that everything’s on the table…you need to be prepared,” Vaisman said. “You need to have your resources either set in a cloud and ready to be transferred with a click, or just have them readily available on an offsite location, which ideally is on a completely different state, or even better, on a different continent, if regulation allows that, and be ready for everything.”