Texas storms, freezes and outages: keeping a small office's IT running through them

Plan for the outage, not the storm

To protect an office's IT from Texas weather, put the firewall, switch and any server on a battery backup so short outages do not drop the network or corrupt data, protect equipment from surges when power returns, keep the IT closet cool through the summer, and keep a tested backup offsite so a damaged server is an inconvenience rather than a disaster. Then decide in writing how the office keeps working when the building itself is unusable, which usually means laptops and cloud files. You cannot stop the weather, but you can make sure an outage costs you hours, not your data.

I am Anthony Omini, owner of Cross River Tech in Dallas. Every year the weather here tests small office IT in some way, whether it is spring storms, a hundred-degree closet in August or a hard freeze. The offices that come through without drama are the ones that planned for a dead building rather than a particular storm.

What North Texas weather does to office equipment

The risks are not exotic. They are the same few things, year after year, and each one has a straightforward answer.

Where the equipment lives makes a difference to several of these at once. A rack on the floor of a closet under a roof drain, or against an exterior wall that gets the afternoon sun, is exposed to water and heat that a rack in an interior room is not. When an office is being built out or moved, choosing the IT room with weather in mind costs nothing extra.

• Short flickers during storms that reboot unprotected equipment in the middle of the workday
• Surges and spikes when power returns, which can damage power supplies and network gear
• Longer outages after severe storms or ice, sometimes lasting days, as Texans saw in the February 2021 winter storm
• Summer heat in closed IT closets, which shortens the life of servers, switches and batteries
• Water from roof leaks, hail damage or pipes that burst in a freeze
• An office nobody can reach because of ice or damage, even when the equipment is fine

Battery backup buys minutes, and minutes are enough

An uninterruptible power supply, the battery box under the rack, is the single cheapest piece of protection in the closet. It keeps the firewall, switch and server running through the brief flickers that come with thunderstorms, so a two-second blip does not knock everyone offline or corrupt a database mid-write. Every network rack we build includes one.

What a battery backup does not do is run an office through a long outage. Its job in a longer event is to keep things up long enough for the server to shut down cleanly instead of losing power mid-operation. That shutdown should happen automatically, because nobody will be standing in the closet at 2 AM. Batteries also wear out, faster in a hot room, so they need to be tested and replaced on a schedule rather than when they fail during the storm.

The surge when the lights come back

Damage often happens at the end of an outage rather than the start. Ready.gov warns that power may return with momentary surges or spikes that can cause damage, and recommends disconnecting electronics to avoid it. For a home, that means unplugging the television. For an office, it means the server, network and computers should be on surge-protected power, and staff should know to shut down and unplug their own desks when a long outage is expected.

Lightning can also travel in on cables other than power, including the internet line. Equipment that sits on a quality battery backup with surge protection fares far better than equipment plugged straight into the wall or into a cheap power strip from the supply closet.

Heat is the slow threat

Storms get the attention, but summer heat quietly ages more office equipment than anything else. A server and switch in a small closet with the door shut generate their own heat, and on top of a Texas summer that can push the room well past what the equipment is designed for. If the building turns down the air conditioning on nights and weekends, the closet can bake for two days at a time.

The IT room should have some airflow and should not double as storage for boxes and paper, which trap heat. Put your hand on the door in August. If the closet feels hot, it is worth a conversation about ventilation before a fan or a drive fails. Monitoring that alerts on failing drives or a server shutting itself down from heat gives you warning instead of a surprise on Monday morning.

When the office itself is out of action

Some events take the building away rather than the power. A pipe bursts in a freeze and floods the suite. Hail damages the roof and water comes through the ceiling. Ice keeps everyone home for three days. In each case the question is the same: can people work from somewhere else this afternoon?

For our managed clients, the recovery plan answers that in advance. If the office is unusable, staff work from laptops using cloud files and email. If the server is damaged, it is restored from the offsite copy that was never in the building. The physical cleanup of a flooded office is a job for a water damage restoration specialist, and it is worth calling one quickly so they can tell you what can be dried and saved. Your data recovery should not depend on how that goes, which is the whole point of an offsite backup. I explain what makes a backup trustworthy in the backup myths that leave small offices exposed.

Working from home only works if it was set up before it was needed. Staff should already know how to reach email, files and the practice or agency software from a laptop at home, with multi-factor sign-in turned on, and someone should have tried it on an ordinary day. Discovering that the remote access never worked, or that the only copy of a key spreadsheet lives on a desktop in the dark office, is the most common way a one-day closure turns into a lost week.

Write down the first hour before you need it

Ready.gov's guidance on IT disaster recovery says the recovery time for each system should match how long the business function depending on it can be down, and that the plan should be tested periodically. For a small office, that turns into a short document, not a binder. For each realistic scenario, such as a server failure, ransomware or an unusable office, it says how long recovery takes, how much recent data could be lost and who does what in the first hour.

We review that plan with each client once a year, and after any big change in the office. The plan's best feature is that it removes decisions from a stressful morning. When the building is dark, nobody should be debating whether to forward the phones.

Keep a short contact sheet with the plan: your IT provider, internet and phone carriers with account numbers, your landlord or building manager, your insurance agent and the vendors for any software you cannot work without. Store a copy somewhere other than the office server, because the server may be the thing that is down.

Before a forecast storm or freeze

When the forecast looks serious, a few minutes on the afternoon before can save days afterward. This is the list I send clients.

• Confirm last night's backup completed, including the offsite copy.
• Make sure everyone takes their laptop and charger home.
• Check that staff can sign in to email and files from home before they need to.
• Shut down and unplug desktops that are not on surge protection.
• Know how to forward the main phone line to a cell phone.
• Keep your IT provider's number somewhere other than the office computer.

Bringing the office back up afterward

Order matters when the power returns. Start the internet equipment first, then the firewall, then the switch, then any server, and only then the workstations, so each device finds what it needs as it starts. If things come up in the wrong order, printers vanish and computers cannot find the server, and people start rebooting at random. My guide to what a small office network is made of explains what each of those boxes does.

Once everything is up, check that the backup jobs are running again, that the battery backup recharged and is not reporting a fault, and that the server's drives are healthy. Then look for the quiet casualties: a switch port that died, a phone that will not register, a printer with a fried power supply. Finding those on the first morning is much better than finding them one by one over the next month.

Getting your office ready before the next one

Most of this preparation is inexpensive and happens once: battery backup and surge protection in the rack, a cooler closet, laptops and cloud files set up for working away from the office, a tested offsite backup and a one-page plan. We build it into our managed plans for offices across Dallas–Fort Worth, and we can review an existing setup hourly with no contract.

If your office has never had anyone look at its IT as a whole, my guide on what a small firm actually needs from its IT support is a good place to start. The best time to find out how your office handles an outage is on a calm, sunny day, not on the morning after a storm.

Questions people ask me