It’s been an interesting week already...
On Monday morning I had a meeting with a potential new customer (who is now a new customer) and the top of her agenda was for us to make sure that their IT infrastructure is at a point where a simple problem won’t cause them a disproportionate amount of trouble. She understands that things do go wrong, and that it’s impossible to mitigate for every eventuality, but she doesn’t want to be out of action because of minor problem. One of the first things we’re going to do for them is a review of their
Contrast this with an existing customer, who called yesterday afternoon to say that their file server had failed. They’ve been a customer for a couple of years now, and for most of that time we’ve been telling them that their 9 year-old file server is on its last legs, and we should look at replacing it. We’ve done our best for them and kept the server running, but the failure that they’ve had means that they are likely to have lost most, if not all the data on that server.
Their backups have supposedly been running successfully, and we’ve recommended that we run some test restores for them, but they insisted that they would do it themselves. From the noises they’re making now I don’t believe it ever happened.
One of my engineers has spent most of today getting alternative provision in place to keep them running. Once that’s sorted we will see what prospect there is of recovering their data. From experience, I’m not holding my breath.
There are a few things that this incident brings into sharp focus, the main one being the reason for me mangling that old saying about planning. In business, you need to assume that things will go wrong, and ensure you put measures in place to protect yourself from the consequences of the failure. This is true for all elements of business, not just your IT systems.
Look around and ask yourself “what if...” For example, what if our broadband connection failed? If you rely on cloud services it could have a major impact. If you have your own server, you’ll probably be without email. What would that do to your ability to run your business?
People tend to think of this in terms of ‘disaster recovery’ which I think is a bit unhelpful because it prompts thoughts of massive events like fires or earthquakes. That’s fine, and these things need consideration, but a more sensible expression is probably ‘business continuity’.
The type of event that cripples businesses is generally pretty mundane, like a disk controller on a 9 year-old server giving up the ghost.
If you would like a free 1 hour review of your IT infrastructure, email phil.battrick@sitm.co.uk
