SMB Emergency Preparedness Checklist

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Emergencies come in all shapes and forms – natural disasters, weather events, global pandemics, cyber attack. But the impact on your business can be universally devastating. The good news is that there are key steps you can take to be prepared for the next emergency and secure your business continuity. Use our checklist below to help prepare you, your business and your team for the next snow storm, freak earthquake, pandemic shut down, or other event that we can’t yet imagine. Happy prepping!

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?

Want to print out our checklist?

Want more? Here are a few more resources to help prepare your organization to nimblu respond to an emergency:

• PGE’s guide to prepare your business for a power outage.
• The IRS’s guide for SMBs to prepare for a disaster.
• The FCC Cyber Planner, which provides SMBs with resources to start creating a customized cybersecurity plan.

Interested in finding out more about developing a comprehensive business continuity plan for your organization? Contact us or an initial consultation to see how we can help.