Do you need help & advice with Cloud?
It might seem like I spend all my time at conferences or filming videos, but I wanted to follow up on the disaster recovery planning videos I’ve been making. It’s quite timely, given the recent AWS outage.
If you’re not in the IT world, you might not be thinking much about disaster recovery. But a few months back, there was a huge power outage in Spain that affected most of the country for a good part of the day. Parts of Portugal and France were hit too. People were confused about these cascading failures – why do things break in such strange ways, and how can we predict it?
Understanding Failures
There are ways to predict some failures, but we always have to consider the "unknown unknowns" – the things we just don’t see coming. It’s pretty unusual for the power to go out for that long, and it’s also unusual for a whole section of AWS to fail. But failures can happen, and the real question is: what do you have in place to deal with it?
The Cost of Disruption
When these events occur, your business needs to be able to react and keep trading. Being unprepared can cost a lot of money. Planning and putting in the effort beforehand can stop these events from impacting your business. If you don’t do that, it comes as a massive surprise, which it really shouldn’t.
Simple Steps for Preparedness
Many of these issues are predictable. You just need someone who knows about these things to tell you what you can do, what the costs are, and the benefits of taking action. It’s important to look at both sides – the cost of doing something versus the cost of not doing something. Sometimes, certain risks just aren’t worth fixing.
Key Takeaways
- Failures, both predictable and unexpected, will happen.
- Having a disaster recovery plan is vital for business continuity.
- Even simple preparation can make a significant difference.
- Consider the costs of action versus inaction.
I’ll be sharing an A4 page you can print off and stick on your server cabinet soon. It’ll have your disaster recovery plan ready to go. It’s really easy and should take less than half an hour to complete. Having something in place is much better than having nothing, especially for small businesses. Something is always better than nothing.
