If you live in Southwest Florida, you've probably noticed. September is usually the month we watch the tropics every morning. This year, there hasn't been much to watch.
As of September 10, the climatological peak of the season, the Atlantic had produced five named storms and not a single hurricane, according to NBC 6 South Florida. By that point in 2024, there had been four hurricanes, including Category 5 Beryl. The season's accumulated cyclone energy, a measure of total storm activity, was running at about 7 percent of normal.
Forecasters saw this coming. In May, NOAA called for a below-normal season and pointed to El Niño. "When El Niño emerges, it usually becomes the dominant factor in total hurricane season activity," NOAA forecaster Matt Rosencrans said.
It's tempting to exhale. Please don't. The same NBC 6 report put it plainly: "A quiet start does not guarantee a quiet finish." The season runs through November 30, and mid-September through late October has historically been South Florida's most vulnerable stretch.
We've been here before
Many of us at vTECH io live and work in the Naples and Fort Myers area. We remember Hurricane Ian making landfall in Lee County on September 28, 2022, and the weeks of outages, flooded buildings and disrupted services that followed. Two years later, Helene and Milton hit the state within two weeks of each other.
For the cities, counties, schools and sheriff's offices that serve these communities, a storm isn't only a facilities problem. It's an IT problem. Dispatch systems, permitting, payroll, student records and emergency communications all depend on servers, networks and data that have to survive the storm or come back fast after it.
And storms aren't the only disaster. On July 19, 2024, a faulty software update from security vendor CrowdStrike crashed about 8.5 million Windows computers worldwide, by Microsoft's estimate. Airlines, hospitals and 911 centers went down on a clear summer day. Ransomware can do the same thing to a single agency any day of the year.
A recovery plan built for hurricanes should hold up against all of it.
Use the quiet
September is National Preparedness Month, and FEMA's theme this year is "Americans Stand Ready." For public agencies, standing ready mostly comes down to whether your recovery plan works when it counts.
A calm season gives you something you rarely get in Florida in September: time. Here's how to use it.
Run a real restore test. Backups that have never been restored are a hope, not a plan. Pick a critical system, such as your financial software or records database, and restore it from backup to a test environment. Time it. Note what broke. Most agencies learn something useful the first time they do this.
Check the 3-2-1 rule. Keep at least three copies of important data, on two different types of storage, with one copy offsite. For Florida agencies, "offsite" should mean outside the storm's likely path, not across town. At least one copy should be immutable or offline so ransomware can't encrypt it.
Write down your recovery targets. For each critical system, agree on two numbers with department heads: how long it can be down (your recovery time objective) and how much data you can afford to lose (your recovery point objective). If the answers are "an hour" and "nothing," your current setup may not deliver that, and leadership should know before a storm, not after.
Plan for no building and no power. Can staff work if city hall or the district office is closed for two weeks? Make sure remote access, laptops and phone systems are ready, and that critical staff know how to use them. Check generator capacity for server rooms and confirm fuel contracts.
Print the important stuff. Contact lists for staff, vendors, your internet provider, insurance carrier and state emergency contacts are useless if they only live on a server that's down. Keep paper copies and copies on personal devices.
Plan for the ransomware version. Walk through the same exercise assuming the cause is a cyberattack instead of a storm. The differences matter. You may not be able to trust your own network, and Florida law requires local governments to report ransomware to the state within 12 hours.
Budget season lines up nicely
For most Florida cities and counties, a new fiscal year starts October 1. If your restore test or tabletop turns up gaps, like aging backup hardware, no offsite copy or servers sitting in a flood-prone room, now is the time to get them onto the list for the year ahead.
A few of these fixes are cheap. Some, like replacing end-of-life storage or moving critical workloads to a more resilient location, take planning and money. Either way, it's much easier to make the case during a calm September than in the middle of a cleanup.
Let's not waste a quiet year
Nobody knows what the rest of this season will bring. The forecasters are probably right that 2026 will finish below average. But "probably" is a weak foundation for a 911 center, a school district or a county records office.
vTECH io helps Florida public agencies design, test and document backup and disaster recovery plans, from restore testing and tabletop exercises to Dell storage and data protection refreshes. If you'd like help putting your recovery plan through its paces while the tropics are quiet, call us at 888-277-5918.
Sources
- 2026 Atlantic hurricane season to be historically quiet, NBC 6 South Florida, September 10, 2026
- NOAA 2026 hurricane season forecast, Spectrum News 13, May 21, 2026
- Microsoft says 8.5M Windows devices were affected by CrowdStrike outage, TechCrunch, July 20, 2024
- FEMA announces 2026 National Preparedness Month theme, Homeland Security Today
- HB 1085 (2026) Bill Analysis, including current local government incident reporting requirements, The Florida Senate