I was doing some thinking today about running a business. As a computer consultant I worked with different companies on different projects. I’ve seen a lot of different things. Some companies use services that are available on the internet. Basecamp, and EBAY are two examples. Does yours? What happens when your internet connection goes down? Would this be a minor or major disaster? Can you afford to not be connected for any length of time? If your answer is “No” then your chose of service probably isn’t the best one. You want to be able to continue working even if your internet connection is down. Your workflow may temporary change but you will still want to continue doing business. You may have to restructure your workflow to work around the problem. What are your options? Everyone has heard about backing up your hard drive on a regular basis. Because at some point the drive will fail. How many of us do this regularly? During Apple’s demo of Time Machine, Apple mentioned that about 4% of their customers regularly back up. The same thing goes for your internet service. At some point there will be a time when your service goes down, what will you do then? If you have a plan in place then all you have to do is follow that plan instead of rushing around trying to figure out what your going to do. I guess what I am trying to say is to plan ahead for disasters or problems. Large companies spend millions of dollars on disaster recovery, planning. While you don’t need to spend millions you do need to plan ahead. Here are some items to think about:
As part of this plan you may want to rework your business processes to be more flexible with regards to disasters.
Hopefully this post will help you better handle the next “disaster” that comes your way.
