Hurricane Helene exposes vulnerabilities in remote work infrastructure

Quick recap: As Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc across several Southeastern states, it emphasized the critical need for preparedness, not only for natural disasters but also for digital disruptions.

• U.S. energy company Duke Energy had more than 590,000 customers still out on Oct. 2, according to PowerOutage.us.
• Moody’s Analytics estimates the economic cost of the storm could reach tens of billions of dollars.

Why it matters: As companies continue adapting to remote work, the hurricane revealed significant gaps in disaster recovery plans for businesses reliant on home-based employees, according to Emmett Hawkins, CTO of Leapfrog Services, a managed IT and security services provider. While many businesses have moved to cloud-based systems since the pandemic, this shift has introduced new issues, particularly when remote workers lack the same resiliency as traditional office setups.

• Cloud migration success: “Most businesses since 2020, when the pandemic hit, migrated a lot of their production systems either to co-location centers or to public cloud services,” Hawkins said, noting that cloud adoption has generally helped protect businesses from physical office disruptions.
• Lack of home redundancy: However, Hawkins pointed out that remote workers often don’t have backup systems, such as generators or redundant internet connections, which leaves businesses vulnerable when large-scale power or communication outages affect employees working from home.

"Playing it by ear": According to Hawkins, fewer businesses are conducting incident response drills, which has further weakened their preparedness. “I’ve seen businesses do fewer and fewer incident response drills and tests,” Hawkins said, warning that this leads to issues with communication and coordination during crises. “Some of these businesses don't even know how they're going to communicate with their employees after a major event. They're just playing it by ear, which is pretty disturbing if you compare that to what best practice is or how things used to be.”

The Bottom Line: While cloud services have mitigated the risks of office-based disruptions, they have not solved the problem entirely. Remote work’s lack of infrastructure resiliency is now a new challenge, especially during large-scale natural disasters. Businesses need to reassess their disaster recovery plans to ensure that remote employees can continue working even when their home environments are disrupted.