Backup and recovery

What to do if you cannot get into the office

The alarm goes off at 2 a.m. or the street floods overnight. By morning, the question is how the business keeps working.

1 min readWhat to do if

The short version

A fire, flood, power outage or building closure can shut the office without warning. Here is what to think about first, and what to plan now.

In the first hours

Make sure everyone is safe. Equipment can wait.
Do not go back in until the building is declared safe, even to get laptops or servers.
Tell staff where to work. For many teams that means home, using laptops and cloud services.
Call IT. They can check which systems are still running and start any recovery steps.
Redirect the phones to mobiles or another location, so customers can still reach you.

Which systems were in the building? A server in the office goes down with it.
Where are the backups? If the only copy was in the same building, it may be gone too.
Who has a laptop? Staff who work only on office desktops cannot work from home.
How will customers know? A short message on your website and voicemail helps.

Keep at least one backup copy offsite or in the cloud.
Move key systems to the cloud where it makes sense, so they keep running without the office.
Write down the plan, including who decides, who calls whom and which systems come back first.
Keep contact details for staff and key suppliers somewhere you can reach without the office network.

Tell us what you run today and what is getting in the way. We will get back to you about how we can help.