It’s National Preparedness Month: Prepare Your Family and Your Business for Any Disaster

September marks National Preparedness Month, observed yearly to increase awareness of the importance of preparing for disasters and emergencies that can happen at any time.

Make a Family Plan

The Ready.gov website offers tips and tools for families and businesses to prepare them for disasters better, including a complete guide for putting a plan together for your family.

Planning is the key to surviving, minimizing the impacts, and recovering faster from a disaster. Your plan should cover how you will contact each other and reconnect if separated, including establishing a family meeting place that’s familiar and easy to find. The Ready.gov planning guide covers the four steps you’ll need to take to create a plan for your family and includes a wealth of downloadable preparedness materials.

Prepare Your Business for Anything

Your business is much like your family with regards to disasters: planning is your best bet for ensuring recovery. And with one report finding that more than 60 percent of its respondents suffered more than $100,000 in total losses, and 15 percent of respondents experienced downtime costs of more than $1 million, it’s worth investing in preparing and in protecting your business and your data from disaster.

The Ready.gov/business website offers several Ready Business Toolkits, including hazard-specific versions for earthquakes, hurricanes, power outages, and severe winds. You’ll also find a Ready Business Workshop “How To” Guide for planning and delivering effective Ready Business workshops and Ready Business Videos.

Business Disaster Preparedness and Recovery Resources

Regardless of the cause of the disaster—from hurricanes to hacks—recovery planning and plan testing are the keys to getting your business back up and running as quickly as possible. We’ve put together a natural disaster preparedness site that includes some tips worth reviewing, and our 5-step ransomware disaster recovery template is another helpful tool you can leverage.

We also firmly recommend the 3-2-1-1 backup strategy as the first step in preparing your business for any disaster—and the only way to ensure you can recover your data. This strategy says to keep three copies of your data—one primary and two backups—with two copies stored locally on two formats (network-attached storage, tape, or local drive) and one copy stored offsite in the cloud or secure storage. The last “1” in 3-2-1-1 stands for immutability. Immutable backups are stored in a write-once read-many-times format that can’t be altered or deleted. Regardless of the scope or scale of the disaster, with the 3-2-1-1 strategy in place, your data is protected against any disaster.

Get Started

Disaster can strike at any time. Plan ahead and be prepared. For help with putting effective data protection, backup, and disaster recovery solutions in place, find an expert Arcserve technology partner.