Samuel Johnson, one of the great Englishmen of the 1700s, once said “Nothing concentrates one’s mind so much as the realization that one is going to be hanged in the morning.” It’s like that with many things. My business is based in Tampa, Florida, and in the last few days we’ve been closely watching the developments with Tropical Storm Isaac, which is predicted to become a hurricane and pass close by sometime next week. If you are a Floridian you are used to this; although we’ve pretty much gotten a pass in the last few years, everyone remembers the hurricane seasons of 2004-2005, when 11 hurricanes hit the state.
An imminent hurricane concentrates my mind on the prospect of losing my business data. Without that data, my business is scarcely more than a few documents on file at the state capitol and the county courthouse. And this is true of ALL businesses. This is why all businesses should care about protecting their data. The statistics are stark; more than half of all businesses who suffer a critical data loss will be out of business within 36 months.
What amazes me is how many Florida or Gulf Coast businesses, large and small, have no real coherent data backup and disaster recovery plan in place. I had a meeting several months ago with the network infrastructure manager at a Tampa-area Fortune 1000 company. At this meeting he told me the company had not tested its DR plan in TWO YEARS. I was absolutely gobsmacked, as Samuel Johnson might say. This company stands a good chance of dying, putting hundreds or thousands out of work, if it can’t recover from a critical data loss and yet they don’t know for sure if they can.
Furthermore, critical data loss is most often NOT caused by the big “Hollywood” disasters – fires, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. It is most often caused by someone simply screwing something up, or by a system failure of some kind.
Although disaster preparedness can be time consuming and expensive, the ROI is almost instantaneous if you can successfully recover from a critical data loss. It’s a bit like buying insurance – it is hoped that you will never have to use it, but the moment you do it pays for itself. No business executive in their right mind would invest in facilities, equipment and people without the appropriate insurance. You absolutely MUST do the same for your data.
So, I’ll climb down off my soapbox now. Preaching about the necessity of disaster preparedness is admittedly self-serving for my business, but it is also solid common sense. If you don’t buy backup and/or DR solutions from us, please buy them from SOMEBODY, and then make sure you test, test, test to guarantee the solutions will work when you need them. Let’s allow Isaac to “concentrate our minds” a bit, shall we?