Fiona was four years ago. Is your business actually ready for the next one?

Every September we get the same phone calls. A client watches the forecast, sees something spinning north of Bermuda, and asks the question they meant to ask in April: what happens to our systems if the power goes out for four days?

We've been through Dorian in 2019, Fiona in 2022, and a string of smaller fall storms that still managed to knock out power for 48+ hours in parts of CBRM, Inverness, and Richmond counties. The businesses that came through cleanly weren't lucky. They just had a few boring things in place before the wind picked up.

Here's what we've learned, and what we'd tell you to check this month.

Your UPS is probably lying to you

Walk into most Cape Breton offices and you'll find a UPS under a desk somewhere, blinking green, doing its job. The problem: UPS batteries have a useful life of about 3-5 years, and after that the runtime drops off a cliff. A unit rated for 20 minutes when new might give you 90 seconds when it's seven years old.

If you haven't tested yours since the last provincial election, it's not a backup — it's a decoration. A proper test means pulling the plug and watching how long your server, switch, and firewall actually stay up. Not what the label says. What the battery actually delivers today.

A few things we check on client walkthroughs:

• Is the UPS big enough for what's plugged into it? People add gear over the years and never resize.
• Is the right stuff plugged in? We regularly find monitors and space heaters on the battery side and the actual server on the surge-only side.
• Does it shut things down gracefully? A UPS that dies mid-write can corrupt databases and Hyper-V hosts. The USB or network shutdown signal needs to actually work.

For most small offices, we're specifying units with 15-30 minutes of real runtime — enough to ride out flickers and shut down cleanly if it's going to be a long one.

Power will come back. Internet might not.

This is the lesson Fiona drove home. In many parts of the island, power was restored days before internet was. If your business runs on cloud tools — Microsoft 365, QuickBooks Online, a hosted phone system, cloud POS — a working office with no internet is still a closed office.

A few options we help clients set up depending on how critical uptime is:

1. A cellular failover device on the firewall. When the primary connection drops, it fails over to LTE automatically. Not fast, but enough to run email, payments, and Teams calls.
2. A secondary ISP on a different technology. If your primary is cable, a fixed wireless or fibre secondary gives you real redundancy — not just two cables to the same pole.
3. A cellular hotspot in a drawer with a prepaid data plan. Cheap, dumb, effective for the businesses that just need to process a few card transactions and check email until things stabilize.

We'd rather see a client spend $60/month on a failover plan than lose three days of revenue during a Nor'easter.

If your backups are on a hard drive under the desk, they don't exist

We still see this. A backup drive sitting on top of the server, or a NAS in the same closet. When the building loses power, gets hit by a surge, floods, or (worst case) burns, the backup goes with it. That's not a backup. That's a copy.

A real backup strategy for a Cape Breton small business looks something like this:

• A local copy for fast restore of a single file or folder
• A cloud copy in a data centre nowhere near Cape Breton
• Regular verified test restores — not just "the backup ran successfully" emails

We run Cloud Workspace Backup for Microsoft 365 tenants specifically because a power outage isn't the only threat — accidental deletion, mailbox corruption, and ransomware all hit the same cloud data you assume is safe. And for on-prem servers and endpoints, our managed backup service includes offsite copies and monthly restore verification, which is the part people skip.

Your phone system is part of your IT plan whether you think so or not

A lot of Cape Breton businesses have moved from old copper lines to VoIP over the last five years. Great for cost, terrible for storms unless you plan for it. When the power goes out, that desk phone doesn't work. When the internet goes out, neither does the softphone on the laptop.

Options we typically recommend:

• Set up call forwarding to mobile numbers as a one-click emergency routing so customers can still reach you
• Use a hosted VoIP provider that lets you forward the main line from a web portal on your phone
• For businesses that absolutely can't miss a call (medical clinics, property management, anything with an on-call rotation), a dedicated answering service as fallback

The worst version of this is finding out during the storm that nobody knows the admin password to the phone portal.

The pre-storm checklist we send our managed clients

When there's a named storm in the forecast within 72 hours, we do a walk-through with our managed IT clients that looks roughly like this:

• Verify all backups completed in the last 24 hours and one is offsite
• Confirm UPS batteries are healthy and correctly loaded
• Test cellular failover if configured
• Charge laptops and any spare batteries
• Document call-forwarding steps for the phone system
• Elevate any gear that's on a basement floor — we've seen a lot of wet servers
• Shut down non-essential equipment before the storm to reduce surge exposure
• Photograph the server rack and cabling, so if anything gets disconnected you know where it went

None of it is glamorous. All of it takes about an hour. And every year, the clients who do it are the ones open for business on the Monday after.

Don't wait for the forecast to get scary

If you're reading this and realizing you don't actually know what happens to your business when the power goes out for two days — that's the honest starting point. It's cheaper and calmer to figure this out in September than it is to figure it out at 11pm on a Saturday with the wind picking up.

We're happy to come out, walk your office, and give you a straight answer on where you're exposed and what it would cost to fix. No pitch, no scare tactics — just a checklist you can act on. Book a free walkthrough and we'll get you sorted before the next one lines up on the radar.