By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon
Professional development mentors remind us that we must take care of ourselves first.
They advise that we improve ourselves mentally, physically and emotionally – in other words, attend first to our overall health – so that we’re better prepared to perform well in our roles at work, at home and in our community.
Personal finance mentors do the same when they remind us to pay ourselves first. If we don’t, something will always come up that consumes those funds, leaving us ill-prepared for our future.
Airline flight attendants ask us to put on our oxygen mask first, then help others sitting near us, because we can’t help our kids or significant others if we’re unable to breathe.
What about your business mask?
Here’s the technology version of putting your mask on first:
- Backup your business data.
- Test your backups regularly to be sure you can restore them.
- Rotate your backup media off-site so that a theft or on-site fire or water damage don’t render your backups useless at the time you’ll need them most.
- Document your backup and restore process so that you can restore and get systems running again even though your technology wizard is on a 16 hour flight to Australia.
- Investigate, plan and implement real-time disaster recovery for your business data, particularly if your business model has little downtime tolerance.
If your most important database disappeared right now, how would that impact your business? How would you respond?
This may seem like a hassle. It may seem like unnecessary overhead. Don’t be tempted by those thoughts.
Fact is, if you put your mask on first, you’ll be in a better position to help your customers solve their problems, grow their business and keep paying you. Why? Because your business will be more resilient.
Look back at the business impacts from an event like Hurricanes Sandy or Katrina. If you were impacted by those storms, how would you service customers who weren’t in the storm track? If you can’t, you know they’re likely to find someone else who can.
Your “Someday” is coming
These kinds of things that happen when your business can’t take a power outage, a hard drive crash or similar disruptions. The question is… when?
No one can point to a date and declare (in their Darth Vader voice) that “Your systems are going to fail on this day.”
What I can guarantee, even without considering Katrina, Sandy, Boardwalk fires, blizzards and ice storms, is that it’ll happen…Someday. These things happen to electronic, mechanical devices. You can either be prepared for them or not.
At least once a week, I hear from someone whose “Someday” has arrived. Three times last month I saw it happen to businesses who didn’t have backups. Like a TV show involving the Kardashians, it’s drama you don’t need.
You might think that hardware failures happen more often to businesses that don’t have backups. The reality is that businesses with good backups simply restore them and keep working, so we don’t hear much about their hardware problems. One result of this is that making backups is ignored until it’s too late.
This puts the security of your clients, your employees, your clients’ employees and the families of all these people at risk.
If your most important database disappeared right now, how would that impact your business? How would you recover? How long would it take to get back to where you are right now, productivity-wise? When did you last test your ability to restore your data from a backup?
If you don’t know the answers, ask your technology people. Don’t do it in an accusing fashion, just explain that you’re concerned about the possibility of hardware failure and natural disasters, so you’d like to know what the backup and recovery plan is and how long the recovery period will take for your business. These are things management should know.
Remember, it’s an asset
While there is no good time for this to happen, history suggests that failures are likely during your busy season, or during financial month / quarter / year end.
The good news is that if you have your backup and restore act together, you might lose some time and productivity when your Someday comes, but you’re far less likely to lose your job or your business.
Backup your data. Test your backups to make sure the restores will work. Schedule these tasks.
Care for your data like an irreplaceable asset.
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at mriffey@flatheadbeacon.com.
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Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him atmriffey@flatheadbeacon.com. Check out the Flathead Beacon archive of all of Mark’s blogs.