Earthquake readiness for office IT: a guide for Glendale businesses

Most Glendale businesses have thought about earthquakes in terms of people: where to take cover, where to meet, who has the first aid kit. Far fewer have thought through what happens to their technology. Glendale sits close to several mapped faults, including the Verdugo Fault along the edge of the Verdugo Mountains, and even a moderate quake can knock equipment over, cut power and internet for days, or set off sprinklers above a server closet. The good news is that most of the IT work is cheap, quick and done once. This guide walks through it in the order it matters.

Start with what would actually stop the business

Before buying anything, list the systems your team cannot work without for more than a day. For a typical Glendale professional office that means email and files (often Microsoft 365), a line-of-business application such as practice management, accounting or a CRM, phones, and internet access. For each one, write down where it physically lives. If the answer is "a box in the back room", that box is your biggest earthquake risk. If it is already in the cloud, your risk shifts to whether staff can reach it from somewhere else.

This short list becomes the core of your business continuity plan. It does not need to be long; it needs to be honest about what you depend on.

Secure the equipment in the office

Shaking does most of its damage to technology by moving heavy things. A few changes cover the common failures:

• Anchor floor-standing racks and cabinets to the floor or wall with proper seismic brackets, and keep the heaviest items, especially UPS battery units, at the bottom.
• Get servers and network gear off open shelving. A NAS or switch sitting on a bookcase will end up on the floor. Use a rack, a strapped cabinet or a low, braced shelf.
• Strap or tether desktop equipment that would be costly to replace, such as large monitors, printers on stands and desktop towers on high surfaces.
• Look up. Note where sprinkler heads, water pipes and ceiling tiles sit above your equipment. Water from a broken line can do more damage than the shaking itself.
• Leave slack in cables. Tight patch and power cords get yanked out of ports, or pull the equipment down with them.

Take photos of your equipment and keep an up-to-date list of models and serial numbers stored outside the office. It speeds up insurance claims and makes it much easier to order replacements quickly.

Make sure your backups are not in the same building

A backup drive plugged into the server beside it protects you from a failed disk, not from a collapsed ceiling or a building you are not allowed to enter. You want at least one copy of your important data somewhere that will not be affected by the same event. For a Southern California business, it is worth asking where your cloud backup is stored, because a copy in another region is protected from a regional disaster in a way that a copy across town is not.

Two other points are often missed:

• Microsoft 365 is not a backup on its own. Microsoft keeps the service running, but deleted or overwritten items are only retained for limited periods. A separate backup of mailboxes, OneDrive and SharePoint covers you if something goes wrong while everyone is scrambling.
• Test a restore. A backup you have never restored from is a guess. Restore a few files and, if you run a server, check how long a full recovery would really take.

Our backup and disaster recovery page explains how we set this up for offices that still keep data on site.

Plan how people will work if the office is closed

After a damaging quake, buildings may need to be inspected before anyone goes back in. In California, inspectors post colored placards: green for inspected, yellow for restricted use, red for unsafe. That can take days, so plan for your team to work elsewhere:

• Laptops over desktops for key staff, so the computer leaves with the person.
• Cloud access that works from home, with multi-factor authentication already set up on personal phones. Enrolling people in MFA during an emergency is slow and stressful.
• Phones that are not tied to a desk. A cloud phone system or call forwarding lets the main number ring on mobiles. Know who can change the routing and how.
• A way to reach staff. Phone networks are often congested after a quake, and text messages tend to get through when calls do not. Keep a staff contact list that does not depend on the office server.

If your team already works partly from home, review our remote worker IT support so the same setup doubles as your emergency plan.

Keep the key information somewhere you can reach

When the office is shut and systems are down, the details you need are often stored on the very systems that are unavailable. Keep a short document, both printed and in a secure place outside the office such as a business password manager, that includes:

• Your IT provider's contact details and account numbers for your internet, phone and software vendors.
• Who holds admin access to Microsoft 365, your domain name and your firewall.
• Where backups are stored and the steps to start a restore.
• Your equipment list and photos for insurance.

Power back up carefully

The first hours after a quake are about safety, not servers. Once the building is cleared for use, check for water, debris and damaged cables before switching anything on. Power often comes back unevenly after an outage, so it is sensible to leave equipment off until the supply has been stable for a while, and to bring systems up in order: network first, then servers and storage, then workstations. If a server or storage device was knocked over, or makes unusual noises when powered on, switch it off and get it checked rather than letting it run. Repeated attempts to start a damaged drive can turn a recoverable situation into a much harder one.

Use the early warning you already have

California's ShakeAlert system can send a few seconds of warning through Wireless Emergency Alerts and the MyShake app. That is not enough time to save data, but it is enough to drop, cover and hold on, which is the point. Encourage staff to enable alerts on their phones.

Test the plan once a year

The Great ShakeOut drill each October is a convenient reminder. Along with the safety drill, spend an hour checking that the backup restores, the contact list is current, staff can sign in from home and the phone routing still works. Small gaps found in a drill are easy to fix; the same gaps found after a real quake are not.

If you would like help reviewing your office's readiness, we support businesses across Glendale from our base next door in Burbank, and can walk through your equipment, backups and remote access with you.