6 Ways of Saving Your Business from Natural Disasters

Human life is full of uncertainties. No one knows what is going to happen in the next minute. Hence, people should always keep themselves prepared for the worst situations. You would have adopted several insurance schemes to secure your family in the near future. Then, you should also take all the essential initiatives to secure your business. After all, it earns bread and butter for you. I am not going to discuss market risks and disasters. An experienced entrepreneur can predict the future market to a great extent. But, it is next to impossible to anticipate exactly when a natural disaster will fall upon us. A natural calamity can badly affect the productivity of your business. Therefore, it is of prime importance to prepare your business for such a worst situation caused by a natural disaster.

2014 Annual Global Climate and Catastrophe Report has found that 260 natural disasters took place each year on average that cost approximately $132 billion per year. This data clearly states that destructive disasters are not rare. So, every business should take all the precautions that can help them survive a disaster and minimize the lasting damages. In this article, I am going to discuss 6 ways to prepare your business for a disaster.

6 Ways Your Business should Consider to Deal with Natural Disasters

1. Look for a Disaster-proof Location

It is a crucial decision to pick a location for your data center. You should always design your data center in a safe location. If you design your data center in a disaster-prone area, you would face difficult challenges in the long run. Before making your data center, you need to gather knowledge about the area.

When, your company is positioned in a flood-prone area, you should not make your data center in the basement of your company because it can become entirely submerged when disaster falls upon the area.

2. Arrange Two Utility Sources or UPS Power Supplies

If you can arrange two different utility sources for your facility, it would be a wise decision. The secondary one can give you support if the primary one fails. These utility sources enable your data center to connect to the critical resources including electricity, water, and voice network.

If terrible flood takes place, you should ensure that your electric resources are traced back to two different substations and the water is routed to these two different main lines. These two lines should be underground. Apart from these, you should give equal importance to the arrangement of your power supply. You need to use the anticipated power usage to fulfill the special requirements of your facility.

3. Focus on Control System Design

Control system of a data center includes generator, swtichgear, and UPS. All these devices act like the brain of a data center. When this control system fails to respond back, your data center may suffer a disruptive failure. This system should be fault tolerant as well. You can distribute control among small and reasonable controllers to individual processes. In this way, you will be able to prevent the loss due to a natural calamity.

4. Always Keep Monitoring the Systems & Remote Designs

Disaster recovery monitoring software helps you a lot to deal with nature calamities. It scans your server, and gathers information on the changes in the configuration. This technology helps you get the increased visibility to warn you about some changes that can destroy your disaster recovery strategy.

In a similar way, remote designs alert you about the unusual changes and patterns due to a natural calamity. With the help of these remote designs, you can identify the problematic issues earlier to fix them before they escalate. In the face of a disaster, remote systems will send text and phone alerts to assure that the data center manager is informed. When the managers are not physically present at the data center, they will be provided with the intel that they need to remotely manage the situation or to ask a colleague.

5. Pick Only the Higher Efficient UPS Power Supplies

UPS power supplies are no doubt an integral part of your facility's data center. UPS provides protection against sudden power cut during a natural disaster. In the event of a sudden power cut, your UPS will keep all the systems running for a short time to boot these systems back in order. Investing in a higher efficiency UPS would be a wise decision. Higher efficiency UPS save energy and cost in the long run.

6. Go for Cloud Services

You should backup and save your data with cloud service. If your data is stored and backed up safely onto a cloud, your facility can easily cope up with natural disasters. It will help you prevent the loss of important data.

A Final Takeaway

Being a business owner, it's your responsibility to ensure each little aspect related to your business. You should take special care of everything, from your data center to the UPS power supplies. Don't forget that prevention is better than cure. So, rather than waiting for a disaster, design a precaution strategy against the natural disasters in advance. Act before it's too late.

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Russell Zahn is a 33-year-old Electrical Engineer from Georgia with over 7 yrs of exp in working with UPS systems, transformers,generators and other electrical equipment. When he is not working, he loves to share his knowledge through his articles.