You never know when a weather emergency might strike in the DC metro area. Whether it is a freak earthquake, “Snowzilla,” or the summer’s unpredictable tropical storms, weather events can impact your ability to get to the office, effect your building or IT infrastructure, or just cause general discontinuity. Be ready for the next unexpected weather event: use our checklist below to make sure you’re ready to weather DC’s next ironically named weather event.
Weather Emergency Preparedness Checklist
- Check to make sure your critical infrastructure is plugged into an uninterruptible power supply (UPS).
- Make sure you test the battery life in your UPS. Make sure you have an emergency communications plan in place and test it with your employees.
- Examine your organization’s phone rerouting plan to ensure you know how and where your calls flow if your physical office location is offline.
- Set up call forwarding.
- Edit voicemail greetings for high profile employees as well as the primary line.
- Does your business use VoIP? Make sure your E911 locations is accurate and up-to-date.
- Physically test what happens with the failure of your primary voice, data, and internet connections. Unplug relevant cables and test to see what happens if only one or two of your paths are active. If you don’t have redundancies built in to your communications links, it’s time to adjust your set up.
- Conduct a technology asset inventory of your organization to determine and document any mission-critical technology components, their location, how they’re configured, and who is responsible for management.
- Check your remote access connection. Are critical employees able to log in remotely from their home or other location, should you be unable to access the physical office?
- Have all your employees, vendors, and client contact information on hand and readily accessible, even if you can’t get to your office.
- Collect the names and phone numbers of all your utility providers (heating contractor, plumber, fire department, insurance agent, building owner) in central place and ensure that it is easily accessible.
- Do you have disaster recovery and incident response plans in place? If so, has it been tested?
