How Should a Houston Manufacturer Prepare Its IT Systems for Hurricanes, Freezes, and Power Outages?

Plan on the assumption that at some point power, internet, the building itself, or your local people will be unavailable, possibly all at once. A continuity plan that holds up in Texas weather covers five layers: power, connectivity, data, people, and rehearsed recovery procedures. If any one of the five is missing, the other four carry less weight than you think.

Houston manufacturers plan for weather in the plant, but the IT side often gets a fraction of the attention until a storm makes the gaps obvious. Hurricane season runs June through November every year, and the 2021 freeze proved the grid can fail statewide in February too. The question is not whether an outage happens, it’s whether your systems and your people are ready when it does.

Here are the five layers, in order.

What happens to your systems when the power fails?

Start with a simple inventory: which systems cannot tolerate losing power abruptly? Servers, network switches, phone systems, machine controllers, and the workstations that run production software all belong on that list.

Then answer, in writing:

How long each UPS actually carries its load, tested, not the number on the box
Whether surge protection covers the equipment that matters, not just the office PCs
Whether a generator is available, what it powers, and when it was last run under load
Who shuts servers down gracefully if an outage will outlast the batteries, and how

One Texas specific point worth knowing: generator power is rougher than utility power. Voltage sags, frequency drift, and the switchover gap can do more damage to servers than the outage itself. Sensitive equipment should run behind a UPS even when the generator is carrying the building, so the UPS conditions the power and bridges the transfer.

The 2021 freeze added a wrinkle hurricanes usually don’t: rolling outages, on and off for days. Equipment that would survive one clean shutdown got power cycled a dozen times. Abrupt repeated power loss is exactly how databases corrupt and drives fail, which is another argument for battery bridging and documented shutdown procedures.

What is your plan when the internet goes out but the plant can still run?

For many manufacturers the building and the machines survive the storm fine, and the internet is what stays down for a week. If cloud ERP, order intake, shipping labels, or supplier portals stop when the connection drops, connectivity is a production dependency, and it deserves the same redundancy thinking as a critical machine.

Work through four questions:

Do we have one internet provider or two, and do their lines physically enter the area on different paths? Two circuits that ride the same pole line fail together.
Is there a wireless fallback, fixed wireless or cellular, that could carry the critical traffic even if it can’t carry everything?
Can the people who don’t need to touch machines work from home if the office side of the building is unusable?
If the building itself is inaccessible, flooded roads count, what functions can continue and from where?

You don’t have to buy redundancy for everything. You have to decide, deliberately and in advance, what internet loss costs per day and what that justifies.

Would your backups actually restore after the storm?

A backup that has never been restored is an assumption. Before every hurricane season, a manufacturer should be able to answer five questions without checking with anyone:

What is backed up, by system, not “everything”
How often each backup runs
Where the copies live, and specifically whether at least one copy is outside the region a hurricane or freeze would hit
How long a full recovery of the critical systems should take
When a restore was last actually tested

That last one is where most plans quietly fail. The off site copy matters more here than in most markets: a backup drive in the same building, or a copy in a Houston datacenter, shares your storm.

We’ve covered the mechanics of doing backups properly, application aware database backups, Microsoft 365’s gaps, versioning for large files, in our construction backup guide, and the same principles apply to a manufacturer’s ERP and engineering files. For the service side, our backup and disaster recovery service exists to close exactly this layer.

Who supports you when your whole city is in the disaster zone?

This is the layer almost every continuity plan skips: the people who fix IT problems live somewhere, and if that somewhere is inside the disaster area, they are dealing with their own flooded street and dark house at the same time you need them.

A regional event affects the IT provider along with the client. When Harvey shut down Houston, Houston based IT staff were Harvey victims too. The 2021 freeze was worse in this respect because it hit Houston and Dallas simultaneously, along with the rest of the state.

Two questions to ask, whether your IT is internal or outsourced:

If our local IT people cannot work for a week, who covers?
Is that coverage in a different geography, or just a different neighborhood?

This is where geographic spread stops being a staffing detail and becomes a continuity control. Braintek runs teams in Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and the Philippines. A storm that takes Houston offline doesn’t touch the Philippines team, and calls still get answered in about 60 seconds because the people answering aren’t in the flood zone. We’ve operated since 2002, which means we’ve run support through Harvey, the 2021 freeze, and every named storm in between, as a company that was itself inside those events.

Have you ever rehearsed the bad day?

The fifth layer is the one that turns the first four from documents into capability. Our recommendation: run a recovery exercise at least once a year, scheduled before hurricane season opens in June, so the plan is fresh when the Gulf starts producing named storms.

It doesn’t need to be elaborate. Pick scenarios and walk them:

The building is inaccessible for a week
Internet is down, power is up, production could run
The main server is dead
Power is out longer than the generator fuel
The local IT contact, internal or provider, is unreachable

For each scenario, name an owner and write down the first five actions. Not the whole runbook, the first five. That’s what people can actually execute at 6 a.m. with the power out, and the exercise will surface the gaps, the contact list stored on the dead server, the generator nobody has started since last year, the backup that runs but has never been restored.

Keep a printed copy. A continuity plan that only exists on the systems it’s meant to recover is a punchline waiting for a storm.

Where should a Houston manufacturer start?

If you do nothing else this month, do these three: test one restore from backup, run the generator under load, and print the emergency contact list. Those three take a day and catch the most common failures.

Then work the five layers in order over a quarter, power, connectivity, data, people, procedures, and put the annual exercise on the calendar for spring.

If you’d rather walk it with someone who has done this across a lot of Texas plants, our manufacturing IT support team covers Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, and the first conversation is exactly this: what runs your plant, what happens to it in a storm, and which gap to close first.

Want a second set of eyes before hurricane season?

Tell us what runs your plant, ERP, file server, machine controllers, VoIP, and we'll walk your five layers with you. What survives a week without power or internet, what doesn't, and what to fix first.

FAQs

What usually takes manufacturers down in a storm, the wind or something else?

Usually something quieter than the storm itself. The building is fine, but the power flickered a dozen times, the internet is out for four days, or the server came back up with a corrupted database because it lost power mid write. Dramatic building damage is the rare case. Utility and connectivity failures that outlast the weather are the common one.

We have a generator. Doesn't that cover the power layer?

It covers part of it. Generator power is typically dirtier than utility power, with voltage and frequency swings that sensitive electronics tolerate poorly, and there is a gap between losing utility power and the generator stabilizing. Servers and network gear should sit behind a UPS that bridges that gap and conditions the power, with the generator carrying the sustained load. And a generator that has not been load tested recently is a hypothesis, not a plan.

How is a freeze different from a hurricane for IT planning?

A hurricane gives you days of warning and hits a defined area. The 2021 freeze gave little warning, hit the entire state at once, and knocked out power in rolling, unpredictable blocks for the better part of a week. Regional events like that are why continuity plans should not assume help, parts, or connectivity can simply come in from the next city over. Sometimes the next city over is down too.

Do we really need two internet providers?

It depends on what internet loss actually costs you. If production, shipping, or order intake stops when the connection drops, a second circuit on a different physical path, or a fixed wireless or cellular backup, usually pays for itself in one event. If you can run on paper for a day, it may not. The point is to decide deliberately instead of finding out during the outage.

How often should we test our recovery plan?

Our recommendation is at least once a year, timed before hurricane season starts in June. A tabletop walkthrough counts: pick a scenario like building inaccessible or server dead, and have the named owner talk through their first five steps. Most plans fail on details a one hour exercise would have caught, like a contact list that lives on the server that is down.

What should we do in the last 48 hours before a named storm arrives?

Confirm the most recent backup completed and that a copy exists off site, gracefully shut down noncritical servers rather than letting them lose power abruptly, top off and test generator fuel, print or export the emergency contact list and recovery steps so they exist outside the systems that may go down, and confirm who is on call and how you will reach them if cell service is degraded.

Can machine controllers and production equipment be part of this plan?

They should be. PLCs, CNC controllers, and the PCs that drive them are often the least protected and hardest to replace systems on the floor. At minimum they belong on the power protection inventory and shutdown procedure, and any configuration or program files stored on them should be copied somewhere that gets backed up.