Tomas Sjostrom, president of Jacksonville, Fla.-based MSP James Moore Technology Services, has been helping protect companies from cyberattacks and hurricanes in Central Florida for 25 years. I recently spoke with Sjostrom about the keys to hurricane resiliency – always a topic of interest in parts of the country this time of year.

Sjostrom, who will speak at on “Establishing a Successful Managed Security Program” Sept. 16 at the The MSP Summit in Orlando, Fla., offered the keys to keeping a business up and running in the aftermath of a hurricane or other damaging storms.

Communication is Key

“We start talking to customers as soon as we hear that something is coming,” Sjostrom said. “We send them our recommendations, and they go beyond technology. Basically, be prepared. Make sure you have updated your contact schedules, and then we tell them that we're going to reach back in phases when we're going to start verifying backups and things like that. And then we also will ask them if they want us to take their systems down, if they want us to do it earlier rather than later and things like that. So basically, as soon as we hear of an event coming, that communication starts, and I think that's good, because it also helps bring the mindset of the customer into the reality that this is pretty serious and they should prepare too.”

Prepare Early

“Generally, most customers will be prepared,” he said. “But every year, there's a couple that get a hurricane warning and say, ‘Well, I can probably ride this one out.’ Part of the challenge we face is to educate our customers who have not been in a bad situation of what and how and why they should take precautions. A lot of times we see companies react really late.”

Protect Your Data with Orderly Shutdowns

“In the days leading up to a hurricane we devote a large part of our team just to secure backups, reach out to customers, and make sure they have procedures in place,” he said. “We're starting to prepare to shut down servers. And a lot of small businesses don’t think of the difference between shutting down an application in an orderly manner, or having it brutally cut off by power outage. So one of the things we're trying to do is take them offline in an orderly manner, which also means that we can bring them back up very fast and very efficiently. And then, as the hurricane or the storm comes through, usually we can follow the pattern of the storm. It’s also good for businesses to have an updated contact schedule. If they have a contact that’s outdated, that always creates a lot of stress for everybody.

Test Backups Year-Round

“We do regular backup testing as part of our service. We will test and verify the customer's backups when there's an event such as a hurricane coming,” Sjostrom said. “Prepare for the worst.

“We just have to keep educating people. A lot of people don't understand the difference between having a corrupt database that we're trying to restore versus having everything start the system up so they’re back up in 30 minutes. If you have a corrupt database, they could be struggling for a week. We’ve seen examples of that. So in a lot of cases, people might not understand the concept of a power outage, and then you have other people who don't necessarily think it's going to be that bad, it's not going to impact them as much. I always believe that it's better to be safe than sorry.”