For businesses in the BC Interior, Peace Region, or anywhere in northern BC, wildfire season is not a theoretical risk. Evacuation orders, power outages, and office closures can happen with limited warning. If your IT systems are not prepared for a rapid evacuation scenario, your business may not be able to operate until it is safe to return. Here is how to prepare.
The Specific Risks of Wildfire Season for BC Businesses
Wildfires create several IT continuity risks simultaneously: power grid disruptions during evacuations, office closures that prevent staff from accessing on-premises systems, internet outages as infrastructure is damaged or deprioritised, and physical hardware loss if a building is evacuated or damaged.
The Prince George area and communities in the BC Interior have experienced multiple wildfire-driven emergency events in recent years. Businesses that operated through these events without preparation typically lost five to fifteen business days of productivity. Those with cloud infrastructure and documented continuity plans stayed operational remotely.
Move Your Dependencies Off-Site
The single most impactful step a BC Interior business can take is ensuring that critical systems do not require physical office access. Email, file storage, and line-of-business applications should be cloud-hosted. If your accounting software, project management tools, or CRM require a server in your building to function, that is a continuity risk to eliminate.
Microsoft 365 and cloud-hosted ERP or accounting platforms solve this. Staff can work from an evacuation centre, a relative's home, or a temporary office in another city without needing VPN access to an on-premises server.
Backup and Recovery for Wildfire Scenarios
Your backup strategy needs an offsite copy that is geographically distant from your primary site. A backup stored in a NAS in the same building is not an offsite backup - it burns down with the building. Cloud backup to an eastern Canada or US region provides geographic separation appropriate for a wildfire scenario.
Test your recovery procedure at least once per year, ideally before wildfire season (March to April). Document the recovery time objective (RTO) for each critical system: how long does it actually take to restore operations if you need to recover from your offsite backup?
Communication and Remote Work Readiness
Establish a communication tree before the season. Who calls whom in the event of an evacuation order? What is the primary communication channel if email is inaccessible? Designate a secondary communication platform - Microsoft Teams on mobile, Signal, or a personal group SMS thread - that does not depend on office infrastructure.
Verify that all staff can access their work applications from a personal device or laptop. Test it before season. Conditional Access policies should allow mobile work without requiring physical office network access.
What to Document Before Evacuation
Maintain an 'IT go-bag' document stored in the cloud: a list of critical vendor contacts, software licence keys, insurance policy numbers, IT provider emergency numbers, and a summary of your backup recovery procedure. If your office is evacuated, this document should be accessible from any device with internet access.
Keep a physical printed copy of the most critical contact numbers in your wallet or vehicle. Power outages and internet disruptions during evacuations can make cloud documents temporarily inaccessible.