BC Wildfire Season and IT Continuity: How to Prepare Your Business

Wildfires create several simultaneous disruptions:

• Power grid instability. Extended outages during active firefighting or when evacuation areas include substations.
• Office access loss. Evacuation orders may prevent entry to your building for days or weeks.
• Internet infrastructure damage. ISP equipment in affected areas can be knocked offline, and crews may not be able to restore service until it's safe.
• Physical hardware loss. In the worst cases, buildings in evacuation zones are damaged or destroyed.

Businesses across the BC Interior that operated through evacuation-adjacent events without preparation consistently report losses of five to fifteen business days of productivity. Businesses with cloud-based infrastructure and tested remote work capability stayed operational.

The single most impactful change a Northern BC business can make is ensuring critical systems do not require physical office access:

• Email and calendar, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. These should already be cloud-based; if you're still running an on-premises Exchange server, migrating it is worth doing before summer.
• File storage, SharePoint/OneDrive or a cloud NAS. If your files require a VPN to a server in your building, that server being inaccessible means no file access.
• Line-of-business software, Accounting (QuickBooks Online, Sage Business Cloud), project management, CRM. All available in cloud-hosted versions. The on-premises version of any of these is a wildfire risk.
• Phone system, A VoIP platform with a mobile app lets your team take and make business calls from anywhere. A physical PBX in your building does not.

Your backup strategy needs to address hardware loss, not just data corruption.

• Off-site backups are mandatory. If your only backup is a drive in the server room, it's in the same building that might be evacuated. Cloud backup with immutable retention means your data survives even if your hardware does not.
• Recovery time matters. If you can restore from backup to cloud infrastructure rather than requiring on-site hardware, your recovery timeline is hours rather than weeks waiting for new equipment to arrive.
• Test your recovery. A backup you've never tested is an assumption. Quarterly restore tests confirm the data is actually there and recoverable.

When an evacuation order comes, your team needs to be able to work from wherever they end up, an evacuation centre, a relative's house, a hotel. This requires:

• Managed, encrypted laptops, every staff member who needs to work should have a company laptop, not a desktop they can't take with them.
• VoIP or softphone, the team can take business calls from their mobile devices.
• VPN or Zero Trust access, if any remaining systems require authenticated remote access, that access needs to be tested before it's needed under stress.
• A written communication plan, who contacts whom when an order comes through. Who decides when it's safe to re-enter. Where to find the emergency contacts list when the person who usually knows is in an evacuation centre.

• List of critical systems and where they are hosted (cloud vs. on-premises)
• Admin credentials stored in a password manager accessible outside the office
• Offsite backup location and last verified restore date
• VoIP provider name and account number (for moving numbers if service goes down)
• ISP emergency contact number for your account
• Insurance policy numbers and broker contact

Print a one-page version of this and keep it somewhere physical, at your home, in your vehicle, not just on the server that might be inaccessible.

Talk to a Prince George-based IT team about wildfire-season continuity planning, call 672-983-1174 or book a free assessment at northstarit.ca.

• Managed IT services
• Cybersecurity assessments
• Cloud and Microsoft 365
• Free IT assessment

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