Welcome to Florida IT Files, our new series on running a business in the Sunshine State. We are kicking off this series with the one thing every Florida business plans around: hurricane season.
Picture a three-provider medical practice in Fort Myers. The storm is two days out, so the office manager does everything the county checklist says: shutters up, generator fueled, staff sent home. The building comes through fine. The server under the front desk does not, because nobody unplugged it before the surge hit the grid, and the “backup” was an external drive sitting six inches away from the machine it was backing up. The practice is dark for two weeks. Reopening day is spent rebuilding the schedule by hand, from a paper calendar someone found in a drawer, because the appointment book lived on the server too. None of it was wind damage; all of it was an IT plan that ended at the breaker box.
That story is fictional. The pattern is not, and if anything, the made-up version is the optimistic one; real recoveries tend to run longer and cost more. Roughly one in four businesses never reopens after a major disaster, according to FEMA, and hurricane season runs June 1 through November 30 whether your recovery plan is ready or not. The businesses that come through a storm cleanly are almost never the ones with the best plywood. They are the ones that could still reach their systems while everyone else was waiting on a restoration crew.
The Generator Is Not the Plan
A generator keeps the lights on. It does not restore a server that took on water, recover files from a laptop that stayed behind in an evacuation zone, or reroute your phones when the office is dark for a week. An untested continuity plan is a spare tire you have never checked; you find out it is flat at the exact moment you need it most.
The Checklist That Actually Matters
- Verified offsite backups. Keep three copies of your data on two types of storage, with one copy offsite. Then test a restore before storm season and time it, because “we have backups” and “we can be running again by Monday” are two very different claims. A backup you have never restored is a rumor.
- Cloud access to critical systems. If your team cannot reach email, files, and your line-of-business apps from a kitchen table in Ocala, you do not have a remote work plan; you have a wish. For a CPA firm, that means payroll still runs on Friday. For a law firm, filing deadlines do not care about the weather.
- A failover option for internet and phones. A cellular backup connection, and VoIP rerouting so office calls forward to cell phones automatically. A logistics company that cannot answer dispatch calls is closed, even if the trucks are fine.
- A UPS on anything that matters. A battery backup is not there to keep you working; it is there to buy your equipment a graceful shutdown instead of a hard crash when the power blinks (and in Florida, it will blink).
- An updated contact tree, printed. Employees, vendors, your IT provider, your insurance carrier. Stored somewhere that is not the server that just flooded, and on paper, because the contact list in the cloud does not help when nobody can log in.
- Documented shutdown and startup procedures. Which systems power down first, who does it, and in what order everything comes back (yes, even if that person is on a beach in Georgia).
- A hardware and insurance plan. Elevate equipment off the floor, unplug what stays, and photograph serial numbers and asset tags now; your insurance adjuster will ask, and “it was a Dell, I think” is not a claim. Contractors, this includes the tablets and laptops living in your trucks and jobsite trailers.
Do It Now, Not at the Cone
Once the National Hurricane Center puts your county in the cone, you have two or three days. By then, every IT provider, ISP, and hardware supplier in the state is hearing from everyone else at once. The gap between “prepared” and “improvising” gets decided in July, not on a Tuesday night with a Cat 3 in the Gulf.
The Bottom Line
Hurricanes are a when, not an if. The businesses that reopen quickly are the ones whose IT plan was finished before the forecast gave them a deadline, not the ones refreshing the radar with an untested backup.
Where GiaSpace Fits
We build and test this checklist for Florida businesses every year: verified backups, cloud failover, documented recovery procedures, and a team that answers when the storm has passed and the real work starts. If your current plan is a generator and good intentions, we should talk before the next cone appears.
→ Schedule a Hurricane Readiness Review with Rob Giannini, our CEO & Founder
