Sandy was a storm of record proportions. John Miksad, ConEdison senior vice president for electric operations, said it wasthe largest storm-related outage in their history and resulted inmore than 7.5 million businesses and households without power in 15states and the District of Columbia.

Moody's Analytics put the economic impact in the $50 billionrange. There are tons of stories of devastating losses and powerfultestimonials of resolve from survivors and victims of thestorm.

However, I hope we remember Sandy not merely for thesestaggering facts and incredible stories, but for the way itimproved your organization's resiliency. Something relativelyunique to Sandy was lessons to be learned with popular trends incontingency planning: having a work-from-home strategy foremployees and a fixed site for workspace recovery.

In Sandy, organizations that relied on a work-from-home strategyas their only recovery strategy encountered manychallenges trying to meet the requirements for employees to: havepower at home, have Internet at home and have a working phone. Mostif not all of these elements have to work in order to your strategyto work effectively and in Sandy that was very difficult.

Power outages were very common and widespread, especially inresidential areas which are generally the last areas to get powerrestored. This allowed for the smallest of windows for employees towork remotely and forced many of them to move where power andInternet service was available. Furthermore, rampant gas shortageslimited how far employees would go for their job.

Compounding the situation was the massive Internet and cellphone outages in the tri-state area. Keynote, an Internet andmobile cloud testing and monitoring service, reported that “almosteveryone in and around New York City” experienced either full-scaleoutages of their Internet connectivity or sporadic performanceissues.

However a work-from-home strategy can be a good answer for someorganizations in certain industries, as long as it is done right;that is, tested in advance of the disaster. “After disasterstrikes, it's really too late to devise a telework plan, expertssaid. “Companies need to start practicing now,” said BarbaraGoldberg, owner of Back on Track Solutions, a business that helpsbusinesses overcome disasters to better serve customers.

Another common recovery methodology that was challenged duringSandy was the concept for work space recovery at a fixed facilityor data center. In regional events the business practice ofover-subscribing their service is exposed. That could leave manyorganizations helpless waiting at the end of the line for spacethat may never be available.

As with any building, these facilities are exposed to the sameconditions when something as big as Sandy strikes. Even though mostof these facilities have redundancies built in and backups inplace, there is still the potential they can fail, and in the caseof Sandy some did.

If you use an offsite data center, co-location or hot siteprovider for your systems and data make sure it's located far awayfrom your location so it isn't exposed to the same disasters asyour organization. If you continue to rely on them for providingworkspace for your employees, I would recommend having backupoptions that provide you flexibility and multiple options forrescuing your staff.

Perhaps the biggest lessons (and hardest) to be learned isunderstanding what your recovery strategy/strategies are andenacting them sooner rather than later. Too many organizationswaited too long to act and found themselves in a precariousposition of standing shoulder to shoulder with thousands of otherorganizations that wanted the exact same thing they did.

There were many factors at play here: some organizations didn'tunderstand their backup strategies or how to execute them, somewanted to defer spending any money towards recovery until afterthey were confirmed down and others simply were hoping to belucky.

Regardless of why organizations didn't move, once supply anddemand kicked in and there simply wasn't enough resources to meetthe demands of the organizations that failed to act early.

The sobering reality is that some of the businesses that failedto act will go out of business while others won't be as big of abusiness as they were prior to Oct. 30, 2012. Business continuityand disaster recovery is about the survival of your organization –from the employees to the people and businesses that rely on yourproduct or service.

Disasters are here to stay and many have predicted that stormslike Sandy will only become more and more frequent. Don't make themistake of not looking far enough back in the history books to seewhat disasters may be lurking beneath your floors or outside yourdoor. (There is a great map of historical disasters at Ready.Gov/Today.)

If you don't take action today, your competitors likelywill. So make sure your business is here to stay by preparing forwhen the “what if” becomes “what now?” Remember, the governmentisn't there and can't be there to keep you in business in business– that's up to us.

Regardless of your recovery strategy, my goal for you is to havemore than just one. I'm not saying to spend this year's and nextyear's budget adding redundancy to everything you do, but ahealthy, mature business continuity and disaster recovery programis one that doesn't rely on a single recovery strategy.

Regional events such as Sandy force you to adapt to theconditions and you have to have a recovery strategy that gives youthis flexibility. The next disaster could be here before you knowit. Just make sure it doesn't happen before you're ready.

Mark Norton is senior continuity planner at AgilityRecovery in Charlotte, N.C.