How Should a Southwest Louisiana Business Prepare Its IT for Hurricane Season?
150 mph
Laura's Landfall Winds (NHC)
2 storms
Hit SWLA in Six Weeks (2020)
June 1
Your Deadline, Not the Storm's
A Southwest Louisiana business should finish five IT preparations before hurricane season opens on June 1: verify that backups exist offsite and actually restore one, put recovery-time (RTO) and data-loss (RPO) targets in writing, line up an internet failover path that fails differently than the primary connection, put protected power in front of every piece of network equipment, and write a plan for operating while the building is unreachable. Hurricanes Laura and Delta proved in 2020 that a Lake Charles business can lose power, connectivity, and building access for weeks — not days. The rest of this checklist works through each item in the order most offices should tackle them.
What 2020 Taught Southwest Louisiana About "Worst Case"
Hurricane preparedness advice written for the rest of the country tends to assume the disruption lasts a long weekend. Southwest Louisiana knows better, and the public record backs it up:
August 27, 2020 — Hurricane Laura
Laura came ashore near Cameron as a Category 4 storm with 150 mph sustained winds — Southwest Louisiana's first Category 4 landfall on record, per the National Hurricane Center's post-storm report and NOAA's historical database. The same report tallies roughly 19 billion dollars in U.S. damage.
The weeks after
Entergy reported that all nine transmission lines delivering power into the Lake Charles area were out of service — seven of them Entergy's own — and estimated it would take weeks before power could even be delivered to customers who could safely receive it. Parts of Calcasieu and Cameron parishes needed a near-complete rebuild of the local grid.
October 9, 2020 — Hurricane Delta
Six weeks later, Delta made landfall near Creole as a Category 2 storm with 100 mph winds, striking nearly the same stretch of Cameron Parish coastline while blue tarps were still on the roofs. National news coverage reported hundreds of thousands of customers losing power again.
None of that is an argument for dread. It's an argument for planning to a documented local standard instead of a generic one: assume weeks of degraded utilities, and assume a second storm can arrive before you have recovered from the first.
The Five-Item Checklist
Verify your backups — then restore something on purpose
The question is never "do we have backups?" It's "when did we last restore a file, a mailbox, and a whole server from them?" Follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of your data, on two different types of media, with one copy stored outside the region — a backup drive in a desk drawer shares a flood zone with the server it protects. Backups are also your last line of defense against ransomware, which is covered in our small-business cybersecurity checklist.
Put your RTO and RPO in writing
These two numbers decide what your recovery plan should cost and what it must deliver — and they belong to leadership, not the server closet. The table in the next section translates both into plain business terms so you can set them deliberately.
Line up internet failover on a different failure path
If your primary and backup connections fail the same way, you don't have failover — you have two bills. Pair your wired service with a wireless (LTE/5G) backup and make the switchover automatic at the firewall, so nobody has to drive through a curfew to swap cables.
Protect the power path to your network gear
Generators keep the lights on, but small generators produce voltage and frequency swings that switches, servers, and phone systems were never designed to absorb. Put a quality UPS between generator power and every piece of network equipment, know your actual UPS runtime, and document a graceful shutdown order so a server doesn't die mid-write when the fuel runs low.
Plan for a building you can't get to
After Laura, evacuations, curfews, and road closures kept people away from offices that were still standing. Decide now how phones forward to cell numbers, which applications your team can reach from anywhere, where the printed contact tree lives, and who checks in from outside the region. Keeping that plan current year-round is exactly the kind of work a managed IT provider carries for you.
RTO and RPO, Translated Into Plain Business Terms
Two acronyms do most of the heavy lifting in any disaster recovery plan. RTO (Recovery Time Objective) answers "how long can we afford to be down?" — the clock starts when systems stop and ends when your team is working again. RPO (Recovery Point Objective) answers "how much finished work can we afford to lose?" — if you back up nightly and the storm hits at 4 p.m., everything entered since last night's backup is gone, and that gap is your RPO.
| How you back up | RPO — work you could lose | RTO — time until you're running | Honest fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| A drive in the office | Everything since the last copy — and the drive itself if the building floods | Days or longer if hardware must be replaced | Not acceptable as the only copy in hurricane country |
| Nightly backup to the cloud | Up to 24 hours of work | Hours to days, depending on how much must be rebuilt and downloaded | Reasonable for many small offices |
| Continuous replication to the cloud | Minutes | Minutes to hours — systems restart in the cloud while the office is dark | Operations that can't pause — clinics, logistics, multi-site retail |
Those are the trade-offs in general terms. The right targets depend on your industry, your compliance obligations, and what an hour of downtime actually costs you — and settling that conversation before June 1 is what separates a plan from a hope.
Connectivity: Design Beats Luck
Item three deserves its own section, because how a connection is built matters as much as having a spare. Aerial infrastructure fails the way poles fail — wind, falling trees, flying debris — while buried plant simply isn't exposed to any of that. The argument for underground fiber in hurricane country is structural, not statistical, and it's why AOP built its Lake Charles-area fiber network underground. We walk through the full engineering case in why underground fiber is the hurricane-resilient choice for SWLA.
Whatever your primary circuit is, the backup path should share as little physical fate with it as possible: a wireless failover unit rides a completely different failure domain than anything on a pole or in a trench. The pairing that matters is buried primary plus wireless secondary — two paths, two different ways to fail.
Hurricane IT Preparedness: Common Questions
Is cloud backup or on-premises backup better for a hurricane-prone area?
For a regional disaster, offsite wins — an on-premises-only backup shares the building's fate, which means it fails at exactly the moment you need it. The strongest setup is hybrid: a local copy for fast everyday restores, plus a cloud copy stored outside the Gulf Coast region for the day the site itself is the problem.
We have reliable primary internet. Do we still need failover?
Yes — reliability in normal weather says nothing about a Category 4. The goal is a second path that fails differently: a wireless (LTE/5G) backup doesn't depend on the same poles, conduit, or upstream equipment as your wired circuit, and an automatic failover rule at the firewall means the switch happens even when nobody can reach the office.
How do I protect network equipment when the office runs on generator power?
Never plug switches, servers, or phone systems straight into a portable generator. Put a line-interactive or online (double-conversion) UPS between the generator and the equipment — an online UPS rebuilds clean power continuously, which shields electronics from the voltage and frequency swings small generators produce. Confirm your UPS model is rated for generator input, and write down the shutdown order for when fuel runs low.
Our data lives in Microsoft 365. Aren't we already covered?
Built-in retention and recycle bins are not a backup. Deleted items age out, ransomware-encrypted files sync upward just like healthy ones, and an account compromise can reach everything the account can. A third-party Microsoft 365 backup that stores copies independently — and outside the region — closes that gap.
When should we start, and how often should we test?
Have all five items finished before June 1, test a restore at least quarterly, and walk through one "the office is unreachable" tabletop exercise every spring. If it's already mid-season, start with backups and failover today — circuits and hardware can't be conjured while a storm is in the Gulf, and 2020 showed the next one can arrive six weeks after the last.
Put a Real Plan on Paper Before June 1
If working through this list feels like a second full-time job, that's the honest signal to hand it to a team whose only job it is. Our guide to choosing a managed IT provider in Lake Charles covers the questions worth asking — including how a provider approaches hurricane planning specifically.
Hurricane-ready IT starts with a conversation
AOP has served Southwest Louisiana businesses from Lake Charles since 1991. We'll review your backups, failover, and recovery plan against the checklist above — no jargon, no scare tactics.
Or call us directly: (337) 477-3700