Atlantic hurricane season runs June through November, but the statistical peak hits late August through September. If you operate a business in Houston, La Porte, Pasadena, Pearland, or Baytown, your IT business-continuity plan should be locked in by mid-July at the latest.
Here's the checklist we run with our managed clients every year — updated for what we've learned since Harvey and adapted for the cloud-first reality of 2026.
Pre-storm: what to verify in the calm
- Backups are current and verified. Don't just check that the job ran. Pull a sample file and restore it. Time the operation.
- Off-site copies are confirmed. If your backup target is in the same building as your servers, it doesn't count. Cloud or geographically separate.
- MFA is enforced. When staff are working from hotels and family homes during evacuation, MFA is what keeps stolen credentials from becoming a breach.
- Contact list is current. Phone numbers and personal email addresses for every employee. Vendor numbers for your ISP, IT provider, insurance carrier, landlord, utility company.
- Cloud accessibility is tested. Every employee should have logged into their key applications from home / mobile in the last 30 days. The first storm-day login is not the time to discover a forgotten password.
- Generators are tested. If your office has any on-premise equipment that must stay online, test the generator and verify fuel supply.
- Insurance is reviewed. Cyber and property policies both. Note your deductibles, coverage limits, and the claim phone number.
Storm-day operations
Once the storm is forecast within 72 hours:
- Power down non-essential on-premise equipment. Surges before and after the storm cause as much damage as the storm itself.
- Communicate the plan. Every employee should know: where do we work, who do we call if X happens, what's the customer-facing communication.
- Set up your customer-facing message. Voicemail, website banner, social channels — consistent message about operations status.
- Confirm remote-work readiness. Anyone evacuating should have their work device, charger, and credentials with them.
- Move critical local data to cloud. Anything that exists only on a local server should sync up before the storm.
Post-storm recovery sequence
After the storm passes:
- Safety first. Nobody enters a flood-damaged building until it's been cleared. Water and electricity don't mix.
- Document damage. Photos and video before anything is moved or cleaned. Required for insurance.
- Power up carefully. Anything that got wet stays off until it's professionally inspected. Surge-affected equipment may seem fine but fail weeks later.
- Restore from backups, not from possibly-damaged local copies. A flooded server with intact drives might still be unreliable. Restore to known-good hardware.
- Reset credentials if devices were lost or unaccounted for. Stolen laptops can become breach vectors.
- Communicate restoration status. Customers want to know when you're operational. So do vendors.
What changed since Harvey
The biggest 2026 difference: cloud-first operations make recovery dramatically faster. If your file storage is in Microsoft 365, your accounting is in QuickBooks Online, your CRM is in HubSpot or Salesforce, and your phones are cloud VoIP, your business can effectively operate from any working laptop with internet.
The 2026 risk has shifted: instead of "our servers got flooded," it's now "our staff are scattered across hotels and we don't have written procedures for remote operations."
A ‘go bag' for IT
Print and save:
- List of every critical SaaS application with login URL
- IT provider phone number (not buried in an email)
- Cyber insurance claim number and 24-hour hotline
- Cloud backup provider login and recovery procedure
- Employee contact list with personal phone numbers
- Vendor / customer top-20 contact list
Keep this in a waterproof bag in your evacuation kit and a digital copy in your personal cloud storage.
Need help getting ready?
Most of our Houston-area clients have a hurricane-readiness check baked into their managed services. If you're not on managed services and want a pre-season walk-through, book a free discovery call — we'll cover the basics and identify gaps before storm season peaks.
Aspendora Technologies has provided IT services and data backup and recovery to Houston-area small businesses since 2010 — including before, during, and after Harvey.