Disaster Recovery 2021: in the past 6 months we’ve seen heat domes, raging fires, a massive Facebook faceplant, water spouts and now floods.
How do you prepare your business for disaster recovery? The last time I wrote about disaster recovery was after a wind storm. We’re now facing more frequent weather disruptions. Like a lot of business owners I start planning for the new year in December and updating my business recovery plan is part of my process.
Disaster Recovery 2021
What if you had to evacuate your office at short notice? What if your office is destroyed? What if you are hacked? How do you notify your clients?
Disaster recovery plans help you answer those questions and plan ahead.
Facebook Faceplant
Facebook suffered a major faceplant October 4th. For over 6 hours all Facebook services (Facebook web site, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, authentication) were down.
A couple of things really stood out for me about the Facebook outage. The first was the lack of communication from Facebook about what was going on. It lead to rumours, people trying to sell their domain name, business owners scared that all their Facebook data and ad campaigns were toast. Their Twitter accounts (oh the irony) posted a few cryptic updates early on during the outage but were silent for over 4 hours.
A proper disaster recovery plan includes how to contact your clients and keep them informed on your status.
The second thing that really stood out for me about the Facebook faceplant was that Facebook didn’t seem to have planned for their network upgrade to go very, very, very wrong. A massive tech company with almost unlimited financial resources hadn’t spent the time and money on planning for disaster with a major systems upgrade.
You can be smarter than Facebook.
How do you know?
How do you know if crucial cloud services like Facebook are down? An important tool is DownDetector. Downdetector monitors all the important cloud services and mobility providers. You can even search services. Downdetector sometimes provides inaccurate results. When Facebook went down, a lot of people were reporting Internet service problems or WiFi problems not Facebook down.
Disaster Recovery Plan Essentials
First have a list of your business essentials (such as internet, emails, power, data). Then ask what if you don’t have access to those? What is the cost? Costs increase the longer the outage. How do you communicate with your clients. Most clients understand if you have an emergency. They won’t understand and will look elsewhere if you don’t communicate with them.
I’m happy to sit down with clients to help them create a disaster recovery plans.
I also provide several services that help mitigate those disasters. Routers that rollover to cell service if the internet is cut. Offsite cloud backups that can be accessed from anywhere if an office is destroyed. Uninterruptible power supplies for when power goes out. Setup cloud based password managers for clients because if their office floods that notebook or that password spreadsheet might get destroyed.
You can be smarter than Facebook. Be prepared for natural and tech disasters with a recovery plan.
