Note: I wrote this post months ago when the George Zimmerman / Trayvon Martin situation was still in the headlines. I decided to let things cool off a bit before posting it.
Years ago, I was a member of an official neighborhood watch association. (“Official” means registered with local law enforcement.) When I signed up, I was sent to a mandatory training meeting with a county sheriff’s deputy. Among many other things, the deputy told us there are two key rules for civilians patrolling a neighborhood:
- Don’t get out of your car. You are not a trained law enforcement officer nor a crime scene investigator. Your job is to look for trouble and call law enforcement when you suspect something is not as it should be.
- Leave your firearms at home. You have no need of them in this capacity, especially if you obey rule #1 and stay in your car.
Regardless of who you think is at fault in the tragic saga of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, in light of the deputy’s two rules, George Zimmerman found himself in a situation that was entirely of his own creation, demonstrating exactly why those two rules exist.
The Moral of the Story…
There is a strong moral to this sad story, which IT professionals would do well to heed:
Disasters are often of our own creation.
In fact most of the major studies on the topic say that user-created disasters account for around one-third of the total, second only to system failures. Here are but a few of the most common that I see in my day-to-day interactions with prospective clients:
- Backups jobs fail because of improper scheduling or timing with other operations, leaving most-recent copies of files unprotected.
- Data recovery operations fail because they were never properly tested, risking loss of entire data sets when something goes wrong in the production environment.
- Entire enterprises are jeopardized because DR plans are out of date, incomplete or inadequately tested.
Backup solution vendors such as Unitrends, Veeam and PHD Virtual now offer tools that facilitate non-disruptive testing, validating the recoverability of data before an actual recovery is ever needed. In addition, tools like PHD Virtual’s ReliableDR facilitate the creation of automated, constantly verifiable DR plans.
To discuss how to minimize the chances of creating your own disasters, contact me by clicking the button below.
