Another Point of Failure
Posted On: 2015-02-06
There is no doubt in my mind that I love working in the online industry. I love it because there is always something new and interesting to do. There is always a challenge so life is never dull but at times it can be so damn frustrating that I want to scream.
Over the past couple of days I've encountered one of those scream moments when I discovered that I had another single point of failure in my business. One of those times where, if something goes wrong, your business grinds to a halt and you're in danger of losing your mind ... as well as your business.
If you've read my columns for a while you will probably have seen me talk about finding all those single points of failure in your business and making sure you have a work around in place in case you hit one of those points. Today I'm going to tell you that you don't just need to have a work around in place in case you hit one of those failure points, I'm going to tell you that you have to make sure that your work around will actually work when you need it to.
Over the past month or so we've been having some serious problems with hackers who have, among other things, dropped some nasty trojans on a couple of our clients' websites and by the end of last Monday I was beginning to feel rather pleased because we had finally reached the point where we had kicked them out and kept them out.
So it was happy times ... or so I thought. What I hadn't realized was that while I had been cleaning those trojans out of my clients' websites I hadn't noticed them sneaking into my computer. While they didn't actually take control of my machine they certainly did cause problems that I only began to notice on Tuesday when it began to lock up and run slow as the processor seemed to struggle with even the lightest load.
I didn't really have time to get the computer tech, who shares our office, to have a look at it and I didn't stop to think that I should have run some scans on it myself; I just soldiered on. But by Wednesday afternoon the computer had reached the point where I was about to hurl it out the window so I unplugged everything and lugged it over to the tech's side of the office.
Unfortunately, while I had been fighting with my computer I hadn't noticed that a couple of other businesses had brought their machines in to be serviced and by the time I arrived with my computer there were three others ahead of me.
But that was OK, this wasn't going to be a serious failure for me, I had a backup computer that I could use while my main one was being serviced. I was smart, I had a work around, I could keep on working instead of just twiddling my thumbs waiting for the computer to be fixed.
Yes, I had a work around that I hadn't turned on in months. All that time that second computer had sat on a side desk just waiting for an emergency and when an emergency arose that computer wouldn't start. And then it dawned on me that even if it had started I wouldn't have been able to get much done because some important files were buried on one of the hard drives in my main computer.
I hadn't even bothered to back up those files in some place other than the computer that wouldn't work. I was not a happy camper and I was even less happy when I discovered that I wasn't going to get the main computer back till sometime the next morning.
But that wasn't the only issue. Over the year or so that I had the backup computer sitting there doing very little I had changed or upgraded a lot of the software that I was using and I hadn't bothered to install any of it on that second computer.
Fortunately I now have the main computer back and that little experience has taught me a couple of very important lessons. The first is that just thinking that you have a work around if a specific problem arises isn't enough; you have to make sure that work around actually works and is up to date. If it's a computer then you have to turn it on regularly to make sure it really will work when needed.
And, if it's something like a computer that you want to use if your main machine goes down, you need to keep the software up to date in it ... and the operating system too. You might be really good at starting that backup computer and running it regularly but if you don't keep the software updated then it's not going to be able to take the place of your main machine when you need it to.
So what work arounds have you got in place for some of the really important problem areas in your business? Have you tested them lately? Will they actually work?