IT and Business Resilience: Lessons from Houston’s Major Disruptions

Houston businesses have been tested by multiple major disruptions in the past decade: Hurricane Harvey in 2017, COVID-19 in 2020, Winter Storm Uri in 2021. Each event has revealed which businesses had resilient IT infrastructure and which did not. The lessons from these events provide a practical guide to building Houston business IT resilience.

Hurricane Harvey: The Flood That Rewrote Business Continuity

Hurricane Harvey caused $125 billion in damage across the Houston area, flooding thousands of businesses and disrupting operations for weeks. The IT lesson from Harvey: businesses with on-premise-only infrastructure and physical backup media in their offices lost both their systems and their backups. Businesses with cloud backup and cloud-accessible applications recovered faster and with less data loss. Physical location is no longer a sufficient backup strategy for Houston businesses.

COVID-19: The Remote Work Test

COVID-19 forced Houston businesses to implement remote work infrastructure in days — or fail. Businesses with cloud applications (Microsoft 365, cloud-based ERP and CRM) and deployed VPN or ZTNA infrastructure made the transition in hours. Businesses with on-premise applications and no remote access infrastructure spent weeks in crisis. The COVID experience permanently changed how Houston businesses think about remote work capability as resilience infrastructure.

Winter Storm Uri: The Power and Infrastructure Failure

Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 knocked out power to millions of Houston businesses and homes for days. On-premise servers require power — data centers require backup power. Houston businesses whose servers ran in co-located data centers with generator backup maintained operations. Businesses with cloud workloads in geographically redundant data centers were unaffected. Uri accelerated Houston cloud adoption among businesses that had been skeptical of cloud reliability.

Building Resilient IT for Houston Businesses

The post-Harvey, post-COVID, post-Uri resilient IT architecture for Houston businesses: cloud-based applications accessible from anywhere with internet connectivity, geographically redundant cloud backup not located in Houston, ZTNA-based remote access for all employees, and a tested business continuity plan that includes natural disaster scenarios specific to Houston risks (flooding, power outages, extended weather events).

IT Resilience for Houston Businesses

SpaceTown IT builds resilient IT for Houston businesses. See business continuity planning, hurricane IT preparedness, and cloud management. Call (832) 304-9748.