Hurricane Season IT Planning: The Texas SMB Edition

Gulf Coast businesses have a hurricane season every year. Most of us get through it fine. When we don't, it's usually because we never rehearsed what we'd do.

What to do in May (before it matters)

• Verify your backups are working AND you can restore from them
• Test your remote-work setup with every team member who'd need it
• Confirm your cell-based internet or satellite backup actually functions
• Review what's cloud-hosted vs. on-prem — the on-prem stuff needs the most planning
• Check your UPS batteries (they last 3–5 years, then quietly die)
• Document who does what if the office is inaccessible for a week
• Get current photos and serial numbers of critical hardware (for insurance claims)

What most DR plans get wrong

They're written, filed, and never tested. The first time anyone runs through them is during a real event. That's the worst time to discover the backup VPN gateway credential is in a password manager that requires MFA from a phone that's out of power.

A DR plan that hasn't been rehearsed is fiction. Rehearse it at least annually. Even a 90-minute tabletop exercise catches most of the gaps.

Cloud is not a hurricane plan by itself

'Everything's in the cloud' is a comforting phrase that isn't a plan. You still need to access the cloud — which means power, internet, and functioning endpoints. If your office is flooded and your staff is scattered, cloud only helps if your people can log in from wherever they are.

Test the full path: home internet, laptop, VPN, cloud access, file availability, phone system. Find what's broken now, not in September.

The Houston-specific considerations

• Ground-floor office space in flood zones — what's your alternate work location?
• Generators for key infrastructure (not just routers — also any on-prem servers)
• Fuel contracts for those generators (demand spikes during events)
• Cell towers can be overwhelmed — a satellite backup gives you communications when LTE fails
• Long-retention backup copies off-site in a different region

When to start planning

May. Not August. Not 'when the tropical depression forms.' The time to test your DR plan is when the weather is calm and your team has the bandwidth to learn what's broken.