NOAA gave this hurricane season a 55% chance of coming in below normal. We're a month from the finish line, and most of South Florida got through it quietly.
That's exactly when practices stop planning.
Here's what I tell every medical office I sit down with in Palm Beach and Martin County: the storm isn't your real risk. Three days without your schedule, your charts and your email is your real risk. The power comes back. The patients you couldn't see and the staff you paid to sit at home don't.
The part that surprises people most is that being "in the cloud" isn't the same as being backed up. Microsoft keeps your tenant running — that's the deal. Their actual backup service for Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive is a separate add-on, billed by the gigabyte. If nobody turned it on, nobody turned it on.
A real continuity plan is boring and short. Who decides the office is closed. Where staff work from. Which three systems have to come back first, and who can restore them at 6am on a Sunday. One page. Tested once a year.
Season ends November 30. As the National Weather Service likes to put it, it only takes one storm to make a bad season — and the cheapest time to find the holes in your plan is while the sky is clear.
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