Almost every owner I talk to has a storm plan. They know who calls who, they know when they would close, they know which employees can get in and which ones cannot. Then the conversation moves to IT and it turns out nobody has thought about it at all.
I think that is because owners separate weather planning from IT planning in their heads. They know a storm might close the office, but they assume email, files, phones, and applications will somehow still be there. That is the gap. If the building loses power, the internet goes down, or nobody can get inside, the business only keeps moving if those systems were designed to work somewhere other than the building.
In a state this small, one storm hits the office and every employee's house
This is where Rhode Island is genuinely different from advice written for a national audience. A company with offices in three states has built-in redundancy: when one site goes dark, another one picks up the work. Here, the office in Warwick, the owner's house in Cranston, and the bookkeeper's house in East Providence are all on the same utility and often the same cable plant. A single nor'easter can take out all of them within the same few hours. There is no other location quietly running in the background.
So continuity in Rhode Island cannot mean spreading your company across geography, because most small businesses here have exactly one location and always will. It has to mean that the systems people work in do not live in your building at all. That is a different design decision, and it is one you make on a calm day in September, not at six in the morning with the wind picking up.
The coastline makes it sharper. Businesses in Newport, Bristol, Warwick, and along the bay are not only dealing with wind and outages, they are dealing with water. And a lot of office space in Providence and Pawtucket is older building stock where the network gear and the server ended up in a basement or a ground-floor closet, because that is where the wiring was. Those are the rooms that flood.
"Everyone works from home that day" is not a plan by itself
It is the answer I hear most often, and it is only a plan if the pieces are already in place. It assumes employees have laptops, secure remote access, MFA that actually works on the phone in their pocket, files that live in the cloud, phones that ring somewhere other than a desk, and a path to every application they need to do a normal day of work.
If the first time you test remote work is the morning of a storm, that is not a plan. That is an experiment, and you are running it on the day you can least afford a bad result.
The problem you prepare for is not the one that hurts
For most small Rhode Island businesses, power and internet loss is the most common immediate problem. It is the one everybody pictures. But losing access to the building is usually the bigger disruption, and it is the one almost nobody plans for.
Water damage, flooding, or a prolonged outage turns a one-day inconvenience into a multi-day problem. The storm is Thursday; the part that costs you money is the following Monday and Tuesday, when the power is back on everywhere else but your space still has standing water, or the landlord has not cleared the building, or the gear in the basement did not survive. Most businesses prepare for the storm itself. Fewer prepare for the possibility that the office simply cannot be used afterward.
How long should a 20-person office actually be down?
For a well-prepared 20-person office, a bad storm should not mean meaningful downtime at all. People work differently for a day or two, but email, files, phones, and core applications are still there. That is the honest answer, and it is achievable for most businesses this size.
For a business that still depends on an onsite server, a local phone system, or office-only applications, the same storm could mean hours or days. The biggest variable is not the severity of the weather. It is how much of your business still depends on the building. Worth being blunt with yourself about what is still tied to that address:
- A file server in the office that everyone maps a drive to
- A phone system with the hardware sitting in a closet onsite
- A line-of-business or industry application installed on one machine, or reachable only from the office network
- Scanning, printing, or plotting workflows that only exist on office equipment
- A backup that is a drive or an appliance in the same room as the server it protects
That last one deserves its own moment of honesty. A backup that lives in the building is not a storm plan, and a backup nobody has ever restored from is a guess.
The cheapest thing you can do this fall
Test remote work before you need it. It costs almost nothing, and it is the single highest-impact thing a Rhode Island business can do between now and February.
- Pick an ordinary day in October or November, not a Friday and not month-end.
- Send four or five people home, chosen from different roles, not just the ones who already work remotely.
- Have them do a full normal day, including the annoying parts: the scanner, the shared drive, the accounting software, the phone calls.
- Write down everything that did not work, with names attached.
- Fix that list before the first real storm.
A test like that reliably turns up missing laptops, passwords nobody remembers, VPN problems, MFA tied to a phone that was never set up, and applications that were never really remote-ready. Every one of those is a small fix in November and a genuine problem in February.
The takeaway is simple: you are not planning for the weather, you are planning for the building being unavailable. If your answer to that is a real one, the storm is a day people work from the kitchen table. If it is not, you find out on the worst possible morning. If you are not sure which one you have, that is a short conversation and a cheap test, and we are happy to walk through it with you.
