Having a plan to preserve your collections management system (CMS) and digital asset management system (DAMS) data is just as important as ensuring the safety of your physical holdings.

If disaster strikes and you don’t have safeguards and a plan in place, your irreplaceable collections data and digital assets could be lost, compromised, or rendered inaccessible.

A data-focused plan will help you make sure no data is lost when a crisis strikes—whether a natural disaster, human-caused emergency, tech outage, or other unexpected event. With the right preparation, your museum can weather any storm.

Understanding the stakes for museums

Museums worldwide are working with greater amounts of digital data than ever before—and the frequency and intensity of natural disasters are increasing.

If a crisis hits, your institution must be ready to protect not just its physical collections, but also its digital assets and data.

From 2020-2024, the United States experienced an average of 23 billion-dollar disaster events per year—including wildfires, winter storms, and hurricanes—a significantly higher proportion than the long-term average.

In Canada, 2024 was the “most destructive year […] due to storms, floods, and wildfires.” Severe weather insurable losses topped $7.7 billion by August 2024, setting a new record.

Natural disasters can have severe consequences for museums, for example:

• Hurricane Harvey (2017): This hurricane significantly impacted local museums, with flooding damaging their structures, archives, and taking down electricity and the internet.
  
  

• Lytton, BC wildfires (2021): The Lytton Museum and Archives and Lytton Chinese History Museum were reduced to ashes during the wildfires. Their irreplaceable collections were severely damaged.
  
  

• UK floods (2023): Storm Babet caused more than six figures in flood damage at The Museum of Making. The building’s design protected its collections, but flooding severely impacted the workshop.
  
  

• LA wildfires (2025): These devastating fires damaged or destroyed many important GLAM facilities, as reported in ARTnews, The Art Newspaper, and Forbes.

While prestigious institutions like the Getty Center have invested millions in disaster-resistant facilities, most museums operate with limited resources. A strategic approach to disaster planning can help museums of any size protect their digital legacies.

What is a disaster preparedness and emergency response plan?

A disaster preparedness and emergency response plan outlines the steps your institution and its staff will take to prepare for, respond to, and recover from threats to your physical and digital holdings.

Its main purpose, overall, is to minimize damage, downtime, and loss.

Traditionally, these plans prioritize physical disaster preparedness and include:

• Emergency procedures to follow

• Evacuation plans for museum staff and visitors

• Strategies for protecting and restoring collections objects

• Documentation on your internal response team’s roles and responsibilities

A data-focused museum disaster preparedness plan goes beyond physical assets and outlines how you’ll protect your institution’s data if unexpected events or emergencies occur.

Having one helps ensure your digital assets and data don’t become compromised, lost, or destroyed in the event of a crisis.

Advantages of having a data-focused plan

A data-focused plan protects your museum’s digital assets and metadata, supports its ability to maintain operations, and facilitates faster disaster recovery.

It will help your institution:

• Minimize system downtime: Prevent your collections management system and digital asset management system from going down, and get these systems up and running quickly if an outage does occur.
  
  

• Avoid permanent loss: Stop irreplaceable digital assets, collections data, and metadata from being compromised or lost in an emergency.
  
  

• Keep operations going: Make sure your museum’s operations continue, even during facility closures or mandatory evacuations.
  
  

• Support team members: Prepare your staff for unexpected events, formalize a structure for dealing with emergencies, and deliver clear guidance during high-stress situations.

Building a data-focused disaster management plan isn’t always easy. But it’ll feel much less overwhelming if you break the process down into manageable steps.

5 steps for creating a data-focused disaster preparedness plan at your museum

From planning to recovery, your disaster preparedness plan should include clear guidance for all stages of disaster response.

That being said, these plans aren’t one-size-fits-all.

Ensure the plan you create is specific to your museum—including its location, your tech stack, the size of your staff, the collections and digital assets you care for, and the external resources you can depend on.

Follow these five steps to build your data-focused museum disaster preparedness plan.

1. Evaluate the current and future risks

How do you know what should go in your plan? It’s all about thinking through the possibilities of what could happen—so you can be prepared for what does.

Conduct a data-focused risk assessment and examine:

• Risks: List each potential hazard, including natural disasters likely to impact your region, human-caused emergencies, and tech outages.
  
  

• Likelihood: Identify how likely each risk is to happen. To keep things simple, use a scale from 1-5, for example, 1=not at all likely and 5=very likely.
  
  

• Impact: Note the impact each risk could have on data maintenance and digital preservation if it materializes. You can also use a 5-point scale here, where 1=insignificant impact and 5=severe impact.

Organizing this information in a spreadsheet will help you easily compare risks.

Take note of the risks that are most likely to happen or will have the greatest impact if they do. Make sure you cover these thoroughly in your final plan.

After your risk assessment, evaluate your current measures for data protection, backups, and operational continuity. Consider how well they’re working and flag any areas that need improvement based on your assessment.

2. Establish strategies for data protection and continuity

Your understanding of each risk’s likelihood and potential impacts will inform your data protection and continuity strategies.

The following will help secure your data, prevent loss, and protect your team’s access:

• Perform regular backups: If a platform goes down, you can revert to your most recent backup without losing important data. Make sure to maintain regular backups of all your GLAM systems' data.
  
  

• Choose cloud-native solutions: Ensure you can access a backup at all times. Cloud-native solutions with geo-redundant storage—as Terentia offers—save your backups in multiple locations, so you have several to fall back on.
  
  

• Assess providers carefully: Your software vendors should have formalized disaster recovery protocols and reliable contingency plans to protect your data. Ask if they’ve experienced security breaches or had their platforms rendered inaccessible by natural disasters—if so, explore other options.
  
  

• Enable remote, secure access: Cloud-based platforms empower your staff to maintain operational continuity, even if they can’t be present at your museum. Choose a DAMS and a CMS that can be accessed securely from anywhere via the internet.
  
  

• Implement robust cybersecurity measures: Protect your systems from opportunistic cyberattacks during natural disasters by setting up strong defences like strict authentication, robust access controls, and encryption. Train your team to spot and report attacks, and regularly audit your protocols.

3. Build an emergency response team

Make sure your museum staff can respond to emergencies quickly by building an emergency response team with a clear chain of command, roles, and responsibilities.

Designate the following roles:

• Emergency response coordinator: Manages response efforts during a crisis, oversees the response team, makes decisions, and coordinates with external supports to mitigate harm.
  
  

• Team leads: Acts as a leader from each relevant team, such as IT, Digital Preservation, Collections, and Communications, to serve as points of contact and keep stakeholders informed.
  
  

• Backup personnel: Appoint team members who can be relied upon to provide extra support and work in shifts to ensure 24/7 coverage.

To avoid crucial delays during crisis situations, create a contact directory within your plan. This document should include phone numbers and email addresses for team members, first responders, software vendors, and emergency response organizations.

4. Develop data-focused response procedures

Establish procedures to help your staff respond to crises and maintain your museum’s operations as you recover:

• Be proactive: Review the risk assessment you completed earlier to identify the potential hazards your museum could face. Implement any safeguards you can before a crisis occurs.
  
  

• Consult your vendors: Software vendors are an excellent data security resource. Speak with them about the contingency support they provide and include it in your plan.
  
  

• Develop your procedures: Outline the procedure to follow if each risk or hazard you identified materializes. Specify how your museum will ensure its data is protected, continue operations, and who will be involved.

Thorough procedures equip your staff to stay calm and confident in stressful situations, ensuring you respond effectively.

5. Practice, review, and update the plan regularly

A museum disaster preparedness plan isn’t just a one-and-done document. To be effective, it must be accompanied by training, practice drills, and regular reviews and updates:

• Train staff on its procedures: Thoroughly explain your museum’s disaster preparedness plan, share where it’s stored, and train teams to be comfortable following it. Make sure to designate a point of contact for any staff questions.
  
  

• Practice, practice, practice: Schedule test runs to help staff feel comfortable, see how the plan performs in practice, and identify any areas for improvement. Refine the plan based on what you learn.
  
  

• Keep the plan updated: Review your plan annually and update it when new technologies are added to your tech stack, data management procedures change, or new lessons are learned from drills or incidents.

To best prepare your museum, treat your plan as a living document, adding to it and refining it when new information emerges.

Resources for museums preparing and responding to disasters

Crises can be devastating, but your museum is never alone. Knowing which external resources you can count on provides peace of mind and helps you plan and respond well.

The following organizations offer helpful resources for emergency planning and response in the United States and abroad.

American Alliance of Museums (AAM)

American Alliance of Museums offers resources to help museums develop and refine their disaster preparedness:

Build and improve your plan: Develop an emergency response plan or enrich your existing one with AAM’s “Developing a Disaster Preparedness/Emergency Response Plan” guide

Get prepared to act: AAM’s “Disaster Preparedness Activity Guide” offers tools for simulating a crisis and helping staff practice responding to emergencies.

Heritage Emergency National Task Force (HENTF)

The Heritage Emergency National Task Force supports cultural and historic institutions in preparing for, addressing, and recovering from natural disasters.

HENTF provides education and training on minimizing natural disaster damage to your museum, and can provide support during crises.

National Heritage Responders (NHR)

National Heritage Responders helps cultural institutions with disaster response by coordinating efforts between institutions, vendors, first responders, and more. Their teams can deliver support or deploy experts in extreme cases.

For easy reference, add HENTF and NHR’s phone numbers and email addresses to your museum’s disaster preparedness plan—in case phone lines or the internet go down.

Safeguard your data and operational continuity with Terentia

Losing irreplaceable cultural heritage data or facing long outages isn’t an option. Your museum needs software that keeps operations running and protects critical data before, during, and after disasters.

That’s where Terentia comes in. The platform is powered by Microsoft Azure, a leading cloud computing platform known for its world-class security, reliability, and global infrastructure.

Terentia helps protect the data and files your DAMS and CMS via:

• Reliable backup and recovery: Secure your data with redundant backups, lower the risk of loss, and avoid prolonged downtime with Azure’s global disaster recovery options.
  
  

• Regional data residency: Choose where your data is stored to ensure compliance with local regulations and protect it with high data security standards.
  
  

• Continuous data encryption: Prevent unauthorized users from accessing your data. Azure ensures your data stays encrypted in storage (at rest) and when it’s moving from one place to another (in transit).
  
  

• Automatic security updates: No need to waste time on manual interventions. Automatic updates and advanced security keep your data safe 24/7.
  
  

• Advanced threat detection: Stay focused on caring for your collections while Azure monitors and responds to threats in the background.

You can’t protect your data during a crisis without a robust platform. Terentia offers strong data protection safeguards and helps keep your data safe and secure—no matter what disasters come your way.

Ready to ensure no data is lost when a crisis strikes? Reach out for a personalized demo of our Azure-powered platform.