722 Preparing Your Business for Hurricane Milton

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with what is starting to become a daily update for Hurricane Milton, and today is Wednesday, October 9th, and let's see here, I've got this live streaming on YouTube, LinkedIn, and the Facebook, and I'm probably going to have some extra people on because we're going to have a special emphasis on my hometown of Satellite Beach, which is on the path, if you're paying attention to the cone of Hurricane Milton, it's in there, so we've got people from the beach that are hopefully by now all boarded up and ready to go, and coming up later, I've got another IT person from the Tampa area, Scott Dollar, has been doing this for quite a while, has some clients over in Tampa, so we're going to talk about the tech side of helping people prepare both data and operational, and of course, the reason I'm starting late, had a client with an issue that they're off today, and had some remote issues, so had to deal with that, so that's why I'm not starting right at four o'clock, but it is fun, it is great, let me go ahead and get started with, let me share the screen here, so as we talk, you can see what we're dealing with here, and I'm going to bring up my favorite page here that I'd love to show you, windy.com, that is there, and I'm going to start to do a little banner scroll of numbers that people can call for all sorts of reasons, the reason I'm putting the numbers up is I've been contacted over the last 48 hours a lot by friends and colleagues asking about what they can do, they've got people in the area, I've seen some other posts as well on social media where people are not evacuating and people are nervous, so if you're looking for assistance in these things, I'm putting the numbers up, I will have them in the show notes, I actually have a web page that I've added to the itbusinesspodcast.com site, if you click at the tab, Milton, it will take you to a page that has some phone numbers and websites that you can look up in, you know, the things like the Florida disaster, the one thing I want to point out at the very bottom there and here is that if there were people stuck, now is probably not the time to try to evaluate, but Uber had started doing a thing with free evacuations to where if you needed a ride out and you could not get somebody to help you, you could get a free ride with Uber, and if you go into the app and put in your destination, you use the promo code MILTONRELIEF in the app and the ride will be completely covered there, so that is something that Uber is doing if people are having trouble with transportation out of the storm, and then of course, as I said, go to the website and look up the other numbers, they're scrolling across the screen here, and as we zoom in on the map here, you can see Milton is getting close to Florida, and the information as of 3 30 p.m. when I did my last check is that Milton is a category 4 storm. The maximum sustained winds are 155 miles per hour, approximately 280 miles southwest of Tampa, moving northeast at 14 miles an hour, and of course, the forecast track shows Milton making landfall near Sarasota, Florida, and the time frame has now moved up. It was around 1 or 2 a.m. It has now moved up to around 10 to 12 p.m. Of course, that can and probably will change, and I want to stress too that that's when the eye is anticipated to make landfall. If you can see the map, you can see that there is already effects being felt along the west coast of Florida. People will see winds that will be above 40 miles an hour, 50 well before that, and may even be experiencing some of that now. We down here in Fort Lauderdale are experiencing winds already, and I wanted to put this up so that people could see.

I know that a lot of people thought, well, Marv, you said you're in Fort Lauderdale and you're not going to be hit by the storm. It's not exactly true. We're not going to be hit by the center or the eye of the storm that does the most damage, but as you can see, Milton is a very wide storm, and we are going to feel effects.

The effects right now are going up to, you know, north of Gainesville all the way down to Key West, so that's how big this storm is, and I've got it showing the colors, and looking at the colors, the purple here, the darker the purple, the stronger the winds, and as you can see, those winds, if you're going all the way down south as far as Marco Island, Fort Myers, they're getting those winds, and those are winds that are 40 miles an hour at least or higher. The deep dark purples are 60 miles an hour and higher and so on, and then of course, the orange and yellows are still pretty good tropical storm winds, 30 to 40 miles an hour, so that's what we're experiencing, and you can see those go all the way from the Panhandle down almost to Cuba, so this is not a small storm, and while we may not feel the direct effects of a Category 1 storm, we'll still feel some effects, so that there, I know that a lot of you are watching the news, and you've heard about the storm surge that, you know, anywhere from 9 to 13 feet along big portions of the Gulf Coast, the Tampa Bay area, could see a storm surge of 10 to 15 feet above ground level, and then of course, this all could still make its way inland with rainfall predictions as high as 15 inches into the Orlando area, and then of course, wind damage is substantial, so I did wanted to, like I said, show this map.

I'm going to scroll in a little bit further, so if you're listening by audio, just know that I'm showing a map of Florida, and I'm showing windy.com for a couple of reasons. When I got Windy a while back, probably two years ago, in order to see the hurricane features, you actually had to pay for a premium subscription. The app has now made it free that anybody can go on, and if you're either on the app or on the website, you can go in and click on the hurricane tracker, and you will now see that in the Windy app free of charge, and of course, you can always go to sites like the National Hurricane Center, spaghettimodels.com, and see a lot of this, but you're not going to be able to see everything in one space where it's got the projected path, as well as the wind speeds, and all of that, so I'm scrolling in a little bit more here, so, you know, even though the storm has left right now of where the projected eye is, it is still projected to go Sarasota, just south of Lakeland, all the way over to this area here, I mentioned Palm Beach and Vieira. If I scroll in even further, there is my hometown, Satellite Beach, and Melbourne, and I mentioned those because Satellite's where I grew up, that's where I went to high school, yes, it is basically a block from the beach, my mom lives in Melbourne, some of you expressed concern because my mom was in Louisiana, she was able to make it home, she was supposed to fly back today, we were able to get her to call the airline, her and my middle sister, Michelle, they were able to get a flight out yesterday, they left in the afternoon, flew to Atlanta, and then flew into Melbourne late last night around 1145, so she is home today, she was able to make it to get her dialysis treatment, those that do not know, my mom has multiple myeloma, which is a bone cancer, she's going on year three with that, she is doing well, but she still has to do dialysis three times a week, so she got in for dialysis today, that center will be closed tomorrow and Friday, and then she'll go back on Saturday, provided nothing major has happened there, but that is where the path of the storm, I know a lot of my buddies, high school friends and stuff, they're on the beach, there haven't been evacuation orders in that area, so people are kind of wondering what's happening, it's still going to be a pretty strong storm, and it's going to be significant, it's going to enter Florida as a category three or four, it's going to exit as a category one, so it will still be substantial, there will probably be some flooding in the beach area, but I know that Satellite Beach, listen, they've been through this before, we've had storms usually come from the east and do an impact there, this will be coming from the west, so I know that most people, as I know, are prepared, the authorities there will let people know, just stay tuned to your local stations, listen to what they say over there, this will happen, something will need to be done, probably tonight for you guys, because the storm will, well, it will come fast, once it hits land and comes across, it'll probably be in and out within 12 hours, so that is what we're looking at there. Let's see, I've listed all the stuff there, let me quickly, before I bring on Scott, tell you why we started late, so two things, one, as an IT provider, one of the things that I have to do is make sure that my clients are ready for the storm, most of them, even down here in Fort Lauderdale, basically did not go into work today, but they still had to work remote, so most of them have been remote since the year of our COVID, but of course, as people come and go, you've got to add new users to remote access, so I had been doing that over the last couple of days, there is one thing, if you are a tech, that you should make sure is able to be done, is a feature called wake on land, so that if somebody leaves the night before and shuts down their computer, that the next morning, when they go to log in, they can't, so in that case, there were two computers at one client's office, one I was able to go in remotely, click that wake on land, the computer came back, the other did not, and for those of you that have followed my IT business podcast, you will know that I talk about juniors all the time, this office has a junior that, for whatever reason, went in and made a change and allowed this user to change power settings, turn off wake on land, blah, blah, blah, so that person wasn't able to work today, the building was actually shut, they tried to go and get in, and the building said, no, we are not opening for anybody, and that's another story for another day, so obviously, something we've got to worry about there, the other thing that happened literally at 3.30, as I was preparing to come on air, is that another client, where there is both an AJ and a TJ, and if you are a regular listener, you'll know exactly what those are, but juniors, where I don't get the chance to go in and do as much stuff as I need to, ahead of the storm, they're in the West Palm area, lost power to half their server room, so the AJ had to go in, and I had to walk him through moving a couple of power cords and getting them back up so that they can work, which may be late here, so that is what is happening there, so shout out to my mom, she's doing okay, she'll never see this, but no big deal, shout out to Allie on the beach, hope all is well there, tsunami, I hope that you're able to take care of what you've got going on there, and those of you that are scheduled to come to the Tampa area for the ASCII EDGE event at the end of the month, October 23rd and 24th, ASCII has already, should have sent you an email saying that they are aware that this is right in the path of the storm, they will be monitoring, and if there's any significant damage to the hotel, obviously plans will be changed, but they are monitoring and reach out to ASCII for that event there, ASCII also has said if you are an IT provider in the Tampa area that needs assistance after the storm, ASCII members, 100 or so ASCII members have already reached out to say that they will be willing to provide assistance, so if you need some help afterwards, you can reach out to ASCII and they will find some people to help, so since I've already made the transition to tech, let me go ahead and bring in our guest reporter, that is Scott Dollar from Ideal Technologys, Scott, how are you?

[Scott Dollar]
Doing good, another beautiful day in Tampa, Florida.

[Uncle Marv]
It's actually, it is pretty beautiful before the storm, right?

[Scott Dollar]
It was, but yeah, we definitely transitioned into hurricane mode here, just looking out the window with the palm trees blowing and a lot of rain, a lot of wind, a lot of rain at the moment.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, now you are actually in the Tampa area specifically, downtown Tampa, right?

[Scott Dollar]
Correct, so I'm currently in Channel side, basically east side of Tampa, right at the Tampa Bay port.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, now my listeners hear me all the time talk about things that I do to prepare my clients and prepare myself, tell us a little bit about what's been happening in your world for the last, I don't know, 48, 72 hours.

[Scott Dollar]
Yeah, I mean for us, we really started preparing back on Monday and a lot of the traditional things that you would expect, just notifying clients of what are, well, one, recommendations on what they should be doing to prepare for the storm, powering down equipment, disconnecting from power sources, getting equipment off of the ground, right, computers, servers or whatnot, get them to a little higher elevation, but preparing for all of those clients that still have any kind of server infrastructure, but preparing that that's all going to be good, and then also for the users, wherever they're at, make sure that they have their equipment disconnected for the high point of the storm and then also off the ground if they're on first floor.

Most of our clients are cloud-based at this point, so almost the entirety of our organizations that we support are Microsoft 365. We do quite a bit of education, so clients, schools that are still, that are in Google space primarily, so not a whole lot of prim-based servers anymore.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, so that actually helps them being cloud-based, of course. I'm going to say I shouldn't say of course, so about half my clients still have on-prem servers there. The law firms and attorneys that, you know, don't believe in the cloud for some reason or another.

In terms of, you know, infrastructure that you do have to worry about, do you have, like, monitoring on-site for them, or have you instructed clients things that they should do themselves?

[Scott Dollar]
So, I mean, very little. I know I'm on the business development side of the house, so my partner could probably answer this one better than I, but I mean, we typically have a piece of equipment at client location to monitor all the network devices. Of course, we have our RMM tool that's doing monitoring and maintenance for all of our client systems, but yeah, I mean, so much, it's interesting that the handful of clients that we have remaining that still have prim-based equipment legal, so mostly law firms that have, you know, legacy third-party applications, billing systems or whatnot that's still local, but by and far everything is cloud-based these days.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, so let me go back.

[Scott Dollar]
And whether that's client applications, but also for communications too, right? So, I don't think I have a client any longer that has any kind of premise-based phone systems. Everything's all Voice over IP or UCaaS.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, all hosted. Let me do this. Let me ask you about your experience in the past.

How long have you been in the Tampa area, and have you dealt with many of these storms before?

[Scott Dollar]
Sure. So, I moved to Tampa back in 2003, and I was greeted, in 2004, I was greeted with Hurricane Charlie. So, that was the first real hurricane that I went through here in Tampa.

A lot of flooding, storm surge flooding for Charlie, but it did knock power out. We were without power for three days, but that was really the last major hurricane, I think, that came through the area where we were really affected. That said, in Tampa, I'm not out on the beaches or even some of the low-lying areas.

Davis Island, for example, was hard hit. We just had Helene that came through three weeks ago. So, this marketplace is very saturated already.

Not a lot of place for, not a lot of drainage available at this point. So, three weeks later, Hurricane Milton coming through. It's going to make a huge impact here in Tampa, for sure.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. Was there anything that you've learned over the years on how to help prepare better for this time around, whether it's personal or business? I know we're going to probably focus on business, but what have you learned to tell people?

[Scott Dollar]
Yeah. Just be prepared. For myself, personally, I'm in a condo in downtown Tampa.

So, our cars are second floor. The water would have to get to 20 feet before it would touch the tires. And then sixth floor in a condo.

So, likelihood of any water getting this high is pretty much end of days, right? Low-lying areas, beaches. I know we're in an evacuation zone, but here they called for zones A, B, and C, I believe, to evacuate.

But tons of warning, early warning from the local governments about what was happening, storm is coming. Evacuate if you're in those low areas. So, certainly listen to what the authorities are saying.

And then for us, I mean, we've always been prepared, I mean, since COVID, right? So, plenty of supplies here, water, food, the other necessities, so that any kind of extended period of not being able, if there was a flood, not being able to get around, no power, nothing being opened, that we would be able to, you know, be okay through any kind of extended power outage or whatnot.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. Have you had to assist clients in doing preparations in terms of, you know, what they would do for a power outage, generators, anything like that?

[Scott Dollar]
Yeah, not so much on the generator side. Again, most of the businesses that we support here locally, you know, if a major storm is coming through the area, I mean, they're not open for business. Their staff members are either hunkered down here locally or they've, you know, fled the area or evacuated out to some south.

Boca Raton was recommended to me, but most, I think, went north. But yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned the, I think you had mentioned battery backup or UPSs for one of your clients, right?

[Uncle Marv]
Yep.

[Scott Dollar]
So, we had just replaced for two of our clients, one law firm replaced their battery backups two weeks ago, and then a school that we replaced their battery backups about a month ago or so. So, again, just not a whole lot of, I mean, there's no business going on. Schools are out.

So, most folks have fled and, again, most of our clients are cloud-based applications or communications that they're effectively able to operate their businesses from anywhere on the planet. Internet connection, yeah, with some power, right?

[Uncle Marv]
Right. Yeah, my client, like I said, basically declined us to come in normally what we try to do is, beginning of hurricane season, it's a check and, you know, if things aren't scheduled to be replaced, which for battery backups, we're trying to get it on a regular three-year plan. Most people want to stretch that out, but if you're in an area where you get those little brown outages, you know, where the lights flicker but they don't go out, that actually can drain a battery in a battery backup.

So, we had a couple of clients where that happens, you know, several times a year. So, we actually replace the batteries at one client, replace the batteries every year for years one and two. Year three, we actually replace it.

And I'm thinking of trying to do that with all my clients on a regular basis, but, you know, they just think that's superfluous.

[Scott Dollar]
Just wait for it to beep.

[Uncle Marv]
Yes.

[Scott Dollar]
Batteries are bad when it beeps.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, wait for it to beep.

[Scott Dollar]
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I think as proactive as we would want to be with client networks, people are busy. We have several projects that are waiting upon client approval at this point, whether it's backups, disaster recovery, business continuance, clients that we've proposed, cybersecurity, new cybersecurity Technologys to them that we're waiting on. But I think for a lot of clients, it has to be, unfortunately, some kind of catastrophic event, post-catastrophic event or breach or whatever the case may be before they take action on the stuff.

As proactive as we would want to be, right?

[Uncle Marv]
Right. Well, speaking of proactive, I know that, you know, we've been preaching, you know, backup and disaster recovery for a long time, and some clients wait until it's actually upon them before they actually do anything. Did you have any people come to the party late trying to say, hey, can you fix us up?

[Scott Dollar]
I mean, part of our email notification to our clients prior was, listen, we've checked all of your local backups. We've ensured that all your cloud backups are functioning. So, no worry about data loss, but, you know, ultimately just, I mean, be safe, right?

Don't, no, nothing that can't be replaced. Data's in the cloud. So, now, didn't have any fire drills this go around.

[Uncle Marv]
That's good. That's good. Do you have any planning that's, say, different for a hurricane as opposed to any other regular, you know, recovery and disaster process?

[Scott Dollar]
No, nothing really comes to mind. You know, I was watching the news here a little bit ago, too. I mean, we were all focused on hurricanes and everything, and the wind, the floods that go with hurricanes, but, you know, part of the current hurricane and probably every hurricane I would imagine that's going through is there's tornadoes popping up all over the place as well.

So, you know, something that you can plan for. A hurricane, we get plenty of notice, but, you know, I wasn't really thinking that, you know, about tornadoes whenever a hurricane is all over the news and blowing through, right?

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. So, for those watching, I just pulled back up the Windy app, and I was looking for one of these settings will actually show thunder hits. There we go.

So, this is something I probably should have mentioned earlier. So, this is the satellite view, and, again, you can see the size of the storm, and even though they talk about, you know, the path being right over Sarasota, well, these winds extend way far out, but as I zoom in, there's already, you know, these lightning strikes on the other side of the state. Port St. Lucie, Fort Pierce, Indian River Shores, this shows those real-time hits going. So, yeah, it's pretty interesting, and then, as you mentioned there, Scott, inside the storm itself, tornadoes popping up. I think we had one already here in, you know, Broward County, which, again, we're way, you know, what are we, we're five hours, no, two, three, four hours away from Tampa, and then, you know, another couple hundred miles away from the storm, and we're already having these things happen there.

[Scott Dollar]
Yeah, you know, Mark, one of the things I think that we're fortunate about is, you know, Florida, obviously, we're used to hurricanes almost every year, right?

[Uncle Marv]
Yep.

[Scott Dollar]
So, I think the response plan that Florida has versus some of the other states, just thinking about with Helene and rolling up into, you know, the Carolinas and whatnot, and all the damage and the death toll up there, we are blessed, I guess, in that, you know, we're used to this. The response is quick. I was watching the news earlier where our governor was talking, and they've got, you know, linemen coming in from California, Minnesota, to come and help with the storm recovery and getting the power and whatnot back on.

So, I guess we are fortunate in that regard.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, I mean, just preparing up before the storm, having the gas trucks, you know, lined up in all of the ports. I have a client that's inside of Port Everglades down here. I did not have to go to see them this time, but, you know, usually I'll have to make a trip down there, and I can always see the line of, you know, I don't know, 50 plus gas trucks just lined up, either ready to be fueled or fueled and ready to go whenever something like happens.

FPL, I'm sure you've seen, you know, always has caravans ready to go. Yeah, I kind of feel bad for the people, you know, north of Florida that, you know, they just weren't prepared for Helene at all and weren't warned at all about it, and I hope that in the future people, you know, authorities and National Hurricane Center, you know, does more to help prepare these people because Asheville, North Carolina, of course, who would have thought they would have had the effects of a hurricane all the way up there, but even to start to warn them to say, hey, look, this is coming, and this is not going to just disappear as soon as it hits land. That's something that people need to know.

[Scott Dollar]
Yeah, for sure.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Let's see here. I think we've touched everything here.

Again, I wanted to have people get a different perspective because they hear me all the time to talk about stuff, and, you know, most of the time storms miss us, and, of course, this time I talked about not being in the path, and people are like, oh, well, if you're okay, Florida is okay, and I'm like, no, no, no, no, Florida is not okay.

[Scott Dollar]
So, again, former storm Helene, right, it was not a hit on our coast. I think that was up in Tallahassee, but that was 150 miles out, but the storm surge from Helene was five to eight feet. So, unfortunately, we have friends that lost their homes, their cars, and there's a lot of that here in the Bay Area.

The beaches were completely hit hard.

[Uncle Marv]
So, you know what, a question I have, because the wife has the TV on in the front office, and they were still showing the mounds of bulk trash that had not been picked up. I mean, is it still as bad as it looked on TV?

[Scott Dollar]
Bad on the, definitely out on the beaches. I was looking at Gulf Drive earlier, and we have and my sister was down from Knoxville, Tennessee the week before Helene rolled through, and everything was pristine and beautiful, and then one week later, I mean, they have all the sand from the beaches just washed across Gulf Boulevard that runs down the coast, right, along where all the condos and everything are along the water, and all that sand was just pushed up into the roads. Roads were completely buried. That's brutal.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you. I try to do these and keep them short and sweet.

Of course, you've got your local news to pay attention, but I did want to get an IT perspective and the things that, if you've not been through a disaster, take a look at your fellow Florida folks that we go through this all the time, and this is the way to plan for a disaster. Thinking ahead, you know, the only difference, I think, is we do get a lot of warning. Most disasters, you don't get a warning, whether it's an earthquake or flood or tornado and stuff, but the preparation ahead of time that, you know, we talked about the battery backups, making sure that they're charged up, ready to go.

If you can get a client to the cloud, now is the time to do so. This is a great argument for getting them to the cloud, that they don't have to worry about physical servers in a building that they may lose access to, whether it's because of wind or flood or rain or a hurricane, because, you know, for all practical purposes, there are probably going to be some buildings lost across the state of Florida, and if you've got a business that your equipment is in that building, you've got to basically recover from a backup that's hopefully in the cloud somewhere that can be retrieved, making it to where people can work remote. Like I said, all of my clients, even though the offices are closed, they're working remote today ahead of the storm, and unfortunately, I've got one office that's complaining because people are like, well, work until you can't tomorrow.

So that's a little much, I think. People have families to take care of. But Scott, I wish you guys the best over there.

You are, it looks like you're starting to experience the outer edges of the storm in terms of the intensity of those 50 to 60 mile an hour winds. It's going to come in. I guess the good thing is it'll be in at night, so most people won't be out and about on the roads.

[Scott Dollar]
Yeah, it's definitely picking up for sure. I was out and with maybe the, I was out yesterday, taking a walk yesterday morning, and downtown, I mean, it's surreal. No traffic, no people, very odd for downtown, typically a very bustling city, right?

Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, well, that's going to do it. As I said, I will have the website, actually, it's already up if you want to go and get some phone numbers and websites for resources. I'm not sure if we'll be doing an update tomorrow, but I'll probably do one after the storm and check in with everybody and we'll see how things are going.

And if you are not in the Florida area and want to reach out and provide assistance, if you're a member of ASCII, reach out to the ASCII leadership and they'll get you connected and that'll be great. Scott, thank you much.

[Scott Dollar]
I'll see you at ASCII.

[Uncle Marv]
I'll see you at ASCII. And everybody else, we'll see you a little bit for the live show and we'll see you back here again real soon. But until then, holla.