MessageOne Offers CIO�s Top Ten Actions To Prepare For Hurricane Season

Very Active Season Predicted: CIOs Must Prepare for Employee Safety and Business Continuity

Austin, TX – May 17, 2007 – The 2007 Atlantic hurricane season will be “very active” according to recent reports from the hurricane forecasting team led by top forecaster William Gray of Colorado State University. With the official start of hurricane season 2007 only weeks away, MessageOne – with input from several of its New Orleans and Florida-based customers – has compiled a guide outlining the top ten actions a CIO can take to prepare its organization within a hurricane impact zone.

During Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans-based law firm Adams and Reese relied on MessageOne solutions to quickly ensure the safety of its employees and also to secure temporary real estate for its inaccessible offices. According to Adams and Reese CIO David Erwin, “The most important thing is to have a way to communicate effectively in a disaster. Our people were productive, they could communicate, and our clients could email us and have no problem reaching us. That communication was important to continue our business as normally as possible.”

Besides the obvious safety concerns, a lack of planning can affect critical business operations and emergency communications channels. Companies need to be prepared to address both business continuity and emergency communications during the storm's impact, and disaster recovery after the storm's passing.

Top Ten Actions

Make Sure You Can Communicate: Remember that if you can't communicate, you can't recover. It is impossible to predict which systems may be affected by a hurricane or what technology staff will have access to at any given time. Make sure your crisis communications system is flexible and enables multiple communication channels.
Retain Up-to-Date Contact Information for your Employees and Key Constituents: Your HR system, email system, or other corporate system of record can be used as the source for current contact data and be synchronized to the crisis communication system. Develop a process to collect staff's preferred method of contact and make sure you have several different channels to reach each employee.
Plan Post-Storm Roll Call: Don't be caught with an emergency broadcast system to employees that only does half the job. Make sure that your crisis communication system enables a roll call and features two-way communications so that you can locate all employees and identify any that may need help.
Plan for a Remote Recovery Facility: Your organization may find that your physical facilities are incapacitated for a long period of time. Plan in advance for a move to a temporary workspace with access to critical business systems and ensure that your company's documentation is securely archived and accessible from a remote location.
Protect Your Email – You Will Need It: If there is one application that you must maintain in an emergency – it is email. The continuity of your business depends on having email up and running. Employees must be able to communicate with each other and key constituents to keep the business operating – even if that means working remotely from their homes or a remote facility.
Maintain Compliance and Audit Trails: If the corporate email system goes down during a hurricane, your employees may use personal email accounts as an alternative to keep conducting business. Unfortunately, by doing so, the email messages will be out of compliance and unrecoverable to your primary system. Make sure you have a system in place that will maintain email service, while also ensuring compliance and an audit trail in a crisis.
Complete a Disaster Recovery Audit of Your Vendors: If your website is or your DNS is hosted locally, it is likely to go down during any storms impacting your company. Consider hosting some of your key services in other geographies to minimize the impact from a regional disaster.
Test Your Emergency Plan Off Hours: Practice your emergency plan with some of the key staff members out of the loop to make sure the backup staff is able to administer the plan. Verify that you can get a hold of key staff members through multiple channels (cell phones, pagers, home phones, remote office phones).
Plan to Not Stick to Your Emergency Plan – Expect the Unexpected: It is important to have a plan that is executable; however, in real crisis situations, circumstances can change rapidly and in unpredictable ways. Your leadership needs to be able to change instructions quickly and to notify employees with the latest information.
Identify Key Operations and their Recovery Priority: While conditions may dictate the availability of business operations, the overall business impact of operations and processes can be established before the storm. Prioritize and publish recovery sequence plans to minimize the outage effects on the business, customers, suppliers and employees.

Customers Fare Well in Past Hurricanes

MessageOne crisis communication and email protection solutions have kept hundreds of companies, communities and schools operating and enabled them to ensure the safety of their employees during and after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the July 2005 bombings of London's public transit system, the 2004 Southeast Asia tsunami and the 2003 Northeast power outage. MessageOne customers from past hurricanes and disasters include the American Red Cross of Central Florida, Blue Cross/ Blue Shield, Holland and Knight and MaxRe.

About MessageOne

Headquartered in Austin, Texas, MessageOne is the leading provider of managed services for email management, archiving and business continuity. For enterprise email and wireless messaging systems, the company’s Email Management Services (EMS™) provides comprehensive email archiving, storage management and e-Discovery with the total continuity, recovery, and security protection only available from a managed service. In addition, MessageOne’s AlertFind™ provides guaranteed emergency notification and escalation to help companies protect their employees during any crisis or disaster. Millions of users around the world depend on MessageOne for its award-winning managed services.

Download your copy of the guide, Top 10 Actions a CIO Can Take to Prepare for a Hurricane, from the Expert Guides & White Papers section of our online resources.

# # #

For more media information, contact:

Paul D'Arcy
Phone: 512-652-4500
Email: paul_darcy@messageone.com

Kirstan Ryan
Phone: 512-652-4500
Email: kirstan_ryan@messageone.com