Tropical Storm Ana marked an early start to this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, battering the coastline of the Carolinas with 60 mph winds and heavy rainfall over Mother’s Day weekend, a full 3 weeks before any hurricane activity was expected.

It doesn’t take a Category 5, Katrina-level disaster to affect your IT infrastructure. Possible tech disaster scenarios caused by the heavy rains and winds brought on by just a tropical storm like Ana include:

• Power outages that prevent you from conducting business for an extended period of time
• One or more servers fail to come back on when the power does return
• Your office is flooded and on-site equipment is physically damaged

Of course, these potential issues are much more likely to be a problem (as well as a more severe problem) if you’re dealing with an actual hurricane rather than a tropical depression or storm. This season three hurricanes are expected, one of which is projected to be a major hurricane, which means a Category 3 storm or higher.

Remember: significant downtime is more than an inconvenience. You need to operate efficiently to get a reasonable return on the substantial investment you’ve already made in your infrastructure and your workforce. Every minute you lose to downtime means lost production and missed opportunities you’ll have to make for later, and it could take months or even longer for your finances to even out after an extensive period of downtime.

To compensate for power outages at the office, it’s important to mobilize your workforce with cloud-connected devices. Migrating to the cloud allows your employees to access business data remotely, so even if the power is out at the office they can still work by finding a place that does have power and setting up there.

Ana has come and gone, but Bill, Claudette, and Danny (the names reserved for the next few storms) have yet to strike. There’s no better time than now to start prepping for possible disaster.

You don’t want to find yourself dealing with extensive downtime during and after a severe storm, wishing you had the foresight to plan ahead before it was too late. The business continuity, cloud consulting, and disaster recovery services provided by Vertical IT will allow you to weather any storm and keep operating no matter what happens.