Hurricane Season Day 1: The 10-Minute IT Readiness Check for Florida Businesses
Hurricane Season Day 1: The 10-Minute IT Readiness Check for Florida Businesses
Today is June 1. Hurricane season officially starts. Over the next five months, the National Hurricane Center will name somewhere between 10 and 25 storms. Central Florida will feel at least one of them.
If you meant to get your business ready in April and May but didn’t — that’s fine. Here’s the 10-minute check you can run right now to know exactly where you stand before the first named storm forms.
The 10-minute IT readiness check
Grab a coffee. Work through this list. Write down anything that isn’t a confident “yes.”
1. Can your staff work from anywhere tomorrow? (2 min)
Open your laptop and try to access your main business systems — email, accounting, CRM, shared drive — from a guest WiFi network (phone hotspot works). If anything requires being physically at the office, that’s a hurricane-season gap.
2. When was your last backup, and can you prove it worked? (2 min)
Log into your backup system (Datto, Veeam, Acronis, whatever you have). Look at the most recent successful backup timestamp. Then look at the most recent successful restore test. If the restore test is older than 90 days, you have a backup you haven’t verified.
3. Can clients reach you if the office is offline? (1 min)
Call your main business number from your cell phone. Does it route? Does it forward to a cell? Does voicemail work? If your phone system runs on a physical PBX in a closet, it dies with the power. In 2026, cloud-based VoIP is how Florida businesses keep their phones alive during storms.
4. Is your client data in the cloud or sitting on a server at the office? (2 min)
Pick one critical client file. Try to open it from outside the office network. If it only exists on an on-premise server, that server is your single point of failure.
5. Who decides when you close the office, and how do staff find out? (1 min)
Is there a written plan? Who calls who? If it’s “Ric will text everyone,” that works once — until Ric is the one without cell service.
6. Does your cyber insurance cover hurricane-driven outages? (2 min)
Pull your cyber insurance policy. Look for “business interruption” coverage. If your renewal is coming up this summer, ask the broker specifically: “What’s covered if we’re offline for a week because of Hurricane X?”
If you got three or more “no” answers
You still have time. Most of these gaps close in under a day of focused work:
- **Cloud migration for the systems still on-prem** — typically 2-3 days, can be done during normal operations
- **Cloud-based phone system** — can be set up in 24-48 hours, often with your existing numbers ported in
- **Verified backup + restore testing** — a good MSP runs this quarterly as part of a managed plan
- **Written continuity plan with named people and phone numbers** — literally one document, most valuable when you update it annually
What we do for Central Florida businesses before each season
For iTech Plus managed clients, hurricane readiness isn’t a June 1 project — it’s baked in year-round. Cloud backup is continuous. Recovery gets tested quarterly, not annually. Phones are cloud-based by default. Monitoring keeps running during office power outages because monitoring doesn’t live at your office.
That’s the baseline we think every Central Florida SMB should have, whether we’re running it for you or not.
Don’t wait for a storm in the cone
If the 10-minute check surfaced gaps, book a pre-season review before the first named storm. We do a free 30-minute session for Central Florida businesses covering exactly this checklist — no pitch, no upsell. Reach out and we’ll get it on the calendar this week.
