Plan for failure

I am a self-confessed technology fan. I shy away from the term geek, pointing at my wife and kids as examples on the ‘normal’ life I lead, but truth be told it’s probably not too shy of the mark. As a result of this bias towards technology, I naturally gravitate towards technological solutions to problems rather than anything else. Sometimes this is the right choice to make, sometimes it complicates matters. More and mroe I am learning that, at times, it’s better to take the simple approach to begin with and build up from there.

One consequence of my constant dabbling in technology is that I am very aware of its propensity to fail. Behind all the glitz and glamour, the promises of doing twice as much in half the time, the snazzy Web 2.0 interface, and so on, is an infrastructure that sometimes hangs together on wishes and prayers. Having been a tech support manager, I know that usually when the geeks disappear into the computer room it’s so that they can scratch their heads and kick the hardware without anyone seeing. It’s the computer equivalent of a car mechanic’s slow intake of breath through gritted teeth, followed by some meaningless gobbledygook designed to persuade you to leave the car there so they can bang different parts of the engine with a hammer in the hope it starts going again.

OK, I exaggerate somewhat, but the point is, even your trusted IT support expert doesn’t know everything there is to know about your computer. And even if they did, they would not be able to predict just when it will fail. It might be that they can recover from that failure pretty quickly, but that’s not guaranteed. Catastrophic hard disk failure can frequently result in you ending up with an interesting paperweight. And it’s usually at that point that you realise that your backup strategy (you do have a backup strategy, don’t you?) could have been better.

So what can you do? Well, essentially you need to plan for failure. Plan in such a way that if you were to lose your computer/server tomorrow you would be able to recover quickly and painlessly. Because, believe me, your business cannot easily survive a major outage. I attended a Business Continuity event a couple of years ago, and was quite shocked to hear that over 80% of businesses that have a disaster of one form or another are not trading 12 months later. That’s all businesses, whether that have a business continuity plan or not. Although, of course, many don’t have such a plan.

So how do you plan for failure? Well, as I said earlier, the best thing to do is keep it simple. It’s all very well having a complex plan on paper, but the more complex a system is, the more likely it is to fail. So think through the aspects of your business that you would struggle if they disappeared tomorrow (including staff and management too) and consider what you could put in place to mitigate that situation. If you have a business that cannot afford any downtime then it’s worth considering the use of Business Continuity experts to help you put a plan together. And above all, test the plan out….regularly. You can pretty much guarantee it won’t work if you never test it.

Many businesses don;t have a good business continuity plan because they say it costs too much. Those are the businesses that haven’t considered the cost of not having a plan. You will have insurance on your house and car and business premises, why not insure the running of your business too?