After the Hurricane: Expert Advice for Post-Disaster IT Service Recovery

Chris Adams

Hurricane season is in full swing. With the latest incoming cases of mega-storms devastating the Southeastern shoreline, communities are struggling to restore daily normalcy. Accordingly, many voices have weighed in with tips for consumers to get their lives back up and running. People have been stepping up and showing remarkable strength and leadership in helping those affected. However, there is another area that we need to remember in these trying times – and that is businesses continuity.

Today, most (if not all) businesses are heavily dependent on their digital assets and IT functions. This means that if a server is down, a business will not have access to its crucial resources. Even the most basic functions are often tied to these resources. Given the state of flooding and destruction that communities are seeing during storms like Harvey and Irma, business servers are frequently at risk. In 2012 when Sandy hit New York, many data centers fell victim to the storm leaving, several major (and not so major) companies with limited business capabilities in the weeks and months following. Many businesses did not begin moving their assets and focusing on recovery until it was too late.

I want to share tips we advise our clients for keeping your business running during a disaster, or quickly getting back up online after the worst has happened.

Before the Storm, Plan for the Worst

Disaster recovery begins well before the storm strikes.

Disaster recovery begins well before the storm strikes. Have a disaster recovery plan in place. Work with key stakeholders across your company to ensure that measures are in place to address any crisis that may arise. Create a variety of scenarios and plan your responses. Ensure everyone knows and understands their roles and responsibilities. Have a practice run to ensure all parties are working well together.

Additionally, ensure all of your warranties are up-to-date, and if they have expired, consider bringing on a third-party maintenance (TPM) provider. Not only will this save you costs, but TPMs are great support systems in a crisis. When we see a natural disaster, like a hurricane approaching, we work swiftly to contact our clients in that area and have key parts and staff staged and ready to mobilize after the storm has passed.

As the Storm is Approaching ...

As the storm is approaching, notify your OEM or TPM service provider, and let them know ahead of time that there is an incoming storm or a pending disaster that could affect your business. Raising the alert in advance offers your service provider an opportunity to route necessary components to safe staging areas just outside the storm’s reach to expedite recovery once the danger has passed.

After Danger has Passed

After danger has passed and you’ve ensured the safety of your employees, your first goal should be to restore IT servers and bring them back into operation. Turning them on, however, needs be done carefully. As with any water damaged server electrical device, safety comes first. Ensure that there is no standing water with power flowing through it. Before going in, consider switching the breaker for the server room off.

Once the power has been shut down, servers need time to dry. This needs to be done without moving the servers. Any movement may cause otherwise dry critical components, such as circuit boards, to experience additional damage.

After Drying the Servers

After drying the servers, the next step should be assessing the damage. When dealing with post-disaster recovery, there is often damage that is obvious to the naked eye. However, there is also damage that most people would not even think of.

For example, just because the equipment is dry, doesn’t mean its 100% operational. Water can leave corrosive mineral deposits on circuit boards and various other server components. It’s important to be thorough, and follow the manufacturers recommendations for care. If a warranty is still in place, now would be the time to contact the manufacturer.

Alternatively, consider a TPM provider. They have the same expertise as the OEM experts – often they previously worked for an OEM – and can keep your services up and running at 60 percent lower costs.

Monitor the Server Situation Going Forward

Lastly, after addressing the immediate damage and getting back up and running, the final step should always be to monitor the server situation going forward. Sometimes problems resulting from a disaster can appear months later. Keeping on top of server metrics — such as control room temperatures, cooling equipment, and monitoring component failures and other problems — will help alleviate further operation impairment to the business’ IT structure.

Whether addressing disaster recovery yourself, or contacting your warranty service provider, in the end, having a plan is key to effective post-disaster recovery no matter the situation.

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After the Hurricane: Expert Advice for Post-Disaster IT Service Recovery

Chris Adams

Hurricane season is in full swing. With the latest incoming cases of mega-storms devastating the Southeastern shoreline, communities are struggling to restore daily normalcy. Accordingly, many voices have weighed in with tips for consumers to get their lives back up and running. People have been stepping up and showing remarkable strength and leadership in helping those affected. However, there is another area that we need to remember in these trying times – and that is businesses continuity.

Today, most (if not all) businesses are heavily dependent on their digital assets and IT functions. This means that if a server is down, a business will not have access to its crucial resources. Even the most basic functions are often tied to these resources. Given the state of flooding and destruction that communities are seeing during storms like Harvey and Irma, business servers are frequently at risk. In 2012 when Sandy hit New York, many data centers fell victim to the storm leaving, several major (and not so major) companies with limited business capabilities in the weeks and months following. Many businesses did not begin moving their assets and focusing on recovery until it was too late.

I want to share tips we advise our clients for keeping your business running during a disaster, or quickly getting back up online after the worst has happened.

Before the Storm, Plan for the Worst

Disaster recovery begins well before the storm strikes.

Disaster recovery begins well before the storm strikes. Have a disaster recovery plan in place. Work with key stakeholders across your company to ensure that measures are in place to address any crisis that may arise. Create a variety of scenarios and plan your responses. Ensure everyone knows and understands their roles and responsibilities. Have a practice run to ensure all parties are working well together.

Additionally, ensure all of your warranties are up-to-date, and if they have expired, consider bringing on a third-party maintenance (TPM) provider. Not only will this save you costs, but TPMs are great support systems in a crisis. When we see a natural disaster, like a hurricane approaching, we work swiftly to contact our clients in that area and have key parts and staff staged and ready to mobilize after the storm has passed.

As the Storm is Approaching ...

As the storm is approaching, notify your OEM or TPM service provider, and let them know ahead of time that there is an incoming storm or a pending disaster that could affect your business. Raising the alert in advance offers your service provider an opportunity to route necessary components to safe staging areas just outside the storm’s reach to expedite recovery once the danger has passed.

After Danger has Passed

After danger has passed and you’ve ensured the safety of your employees, your first goal should be to restore IT servers and bring them back into operation. Turning them on, however, needs be done carefully. As with any water damaged server electrical device, safety comes first. Ensure that there is no standing water with power flowing through it. Before going in, consider switching the breaker for the server room off.

Once the power has been shut down, servers need time to dry. This needs to be done without moving the servers. Any movement may cause otherwise dry critical components, such as circuit boards, to experience additional damage.

After Drying the Servers

After drying the servers, the next step should be assessing the damage. When dealing with post-disaster recovery, there is often damage that is obvious to the naked eye. However, there is also damage that most people would not even think of.

For example, just because the equipment is dry, doesn’t mean its 100% operational. Water can leave corrosive mineral deposits on circuit boards and various other server components. It’s important to be thorough, and follow the manufacturers recommendations for care. If a warranty is still in place, now would be the time to contact the manufacturer.

Alternatively, consider a TPM provider. They have the same expertise as the OEM experts – often they previously worked for an OEM – and can keep your services up and running at 60 percent lower costs.

Monitor the Server Situation Going Forward

Lastly, after addressing the immediate damage and getting back up and running, the final step should always be to monitor the server situation going forward. Sometimes problems resulting from a disaster can appear months later. Keeping on top of server metrics — such as control room temperatures, cooling equipment, and monitoring component failures and other problems — will help alleviate further operation impairment to the business’ IT structure.

Whether addressing disaster recovery yourself, or contacting your warranty service provider, in the end, having a plan is key to effective post-disaster recovery no matter the situation.

Related Links

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Observability Is the New Control Plane for Enterprise Transformation

The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

When AI Becomes the Corporate OS

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

The $600 Billion Wake Up Call

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Breaking Down Agentic AI Fragmentation and Complexity with Governance

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

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Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

Building AI Agents That Build Trust

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

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For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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