When disaster strikes, assumption is the greatest vulnerability. While many business owners feel confident they can weather an emergency, genuine operational readiness requires more than optimism — and closing that gap starts with simple, actionable steps you can take today to shore up your resilience.

Audit your connectivity

A reliable network is the foundation of any disaster response plan. If a storm takes out a fiber line or a cell tower, a single internet connection means a single point of failure and that failure cascades fast: payments stop processing, orders go unfilled, customers can’t reach you. Backup connectivity solves that. Whether it’s fixed wireless or a mobile hotspot, businesses can continue to operate when primary lines are down. Backup connectivity is one of the easiest, most-affordable protections small businesses can buy, and often one of the most overlooked.

Back up your data, and test it

Files sitting in the cloud can look perfectly fine and still turn out to be corrupted, unreadable or even locked behind credentials that expired months ago. The toughest part is that you won’t discover any of that until the moment you actually need them, which is the worst possible time to find out. 

But having a backup is only half the job. Testing your backups tells you something just as important: how long a full restore actually takes. If the answer is three days, that’s three days your business isn’t operating, and you’d want to know that now rather than in the middle of a crisis.

Set up automated cloud-based backups for your business records, customer data and financial information, then schedule a test restore at least once a quarter. A data backup you’ve never tested is a backup you can’t count on.

Don’t wait for a cyberattack to think about cybersecurity

In an increasingly digital world, investing in cybersecurity is a must, even for small businesses that operate mostly in the physical world. Do you use card readers, store customer information, or manage inventory through software? If so, your business is vulnerable. And disasters make it worse. When systems go down and attention is elsewhere, bad actors move in, betting on the confusion.

The good news is that small business cybersecurity solutions now include AI-powered security tools. These AI tools monitor for unusual activity and flag threats in real time without requiring dedicated staff to watch a dashboard, meaning that you can be alerted automatically to fix vulnerabilities before they’re exposed.

Build a communications plan

Even when you test backups, incorporate cybersecurity and invest in a reliable network, disasters can introduce unforeseen variables. In other words, even the most foolproof plan may not hold up in the face of a disaster. What separates businesses that recover quickly from those that don’t is often just knowing who to call. When the power is out and your phone is backlogged with messages and missed calls, that’s not the moment to figure out who tells your employees not to come in, who reaches out to your customers or who calls the vendor expecting a delivery.

Decide now who contacts employees, customers and vendors when disaster strikes. Document it, share it with your employees, and keep a copy accessible outside of your primary office or system. A clear communications protocol before a disaster is as important as any technical solution.

Know your financial runway

Ask yourself a hard question: if you had to close tomorrow, how long could you keep paying your people? About a third of small business owners surveyed said the answer is weeks, not months. Relief funding for small businesses exists, but it’s not guaranteed and it rarely arrives quickly. 

Know your number now, and decide whether a line of credit or a dedicated emergency fund could bridge the gap between the day you close and the day you reopen.

Know the risks specific to your region and act now

Hurricanes present different challenges than wildfires do, and natural disasters vary by region. Yet many business owners never map out the hazards common to their geographic area until an emergency is already unfolding.

Knowing your risk profile is what makes every other step on this list actionable. It tells you what kind of insurance you need, whether your backup power needs to run for hours or days, and whether your continuity plan should assume you’ll be operating remotely for a week or a month. It also tells you what you can reasonably expect from your local infrastructure. 

Visit Verizon’s Small Business Digital Ready platform to start your preparedness journey today. Explore new courses that can help identify your risks and build your business continuity and mitigation plans. Additionally, completing one of these courses will unlock the opportunity to apply for a competitive $5K grant through the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Readiness for Resiliency program to help prepare your business before disaster strikes. 

From there, the rest gets easier: explore backup connectivity options, schedule a test restore of your data, research AI-powered security tools that fit your budget, and write down who does what when something goes wrong.

Disaster preparedness isn’t just insurance. It’s an investment in the longevity of the business you’ve spent years building and in the community that counts on it being there.

When disaster strikes, assumption is the greatest vulnerability. While many business owners feel confident they can weather an emergency, genuine operational readiness requires more than optimism — and closing that gap starts with simple, actionable steps you can take today to shore up your resilience.

Audit your connectivity

A reliable network is the foundation of any disaster response plan. If a storm takes out a fiber line or a cell tower, a single internet connection means a single point of failure and that failure cascades fast: payments stop processing, orders go unfilled, customers can’t reach you. Backup connectivity solves that. Whether it’s fixed wireless or a mobile hotspot, businesses can continue to operate when primary lines are down. Backup connectivity is one of the easiest, most-affordable protections small businesses can buy, and often one of the most overlooked.

Back up your data, and test it

Files sitting in the cloud can look perfectly fine and still turn out to be corrupted, unreadable or even locked behind credentials that expired months ago. The toughest part is that you won’t discover any of that until the moment you actually need them, which is the worst possible time to find out.