Incredible Internet Outage
Internet Outage, What’s the Next Disruption to Your Company?
Last week, Xfinity had an internet outage that covered the state of Florida. Immediately after the outage, the conspiracies started flying. Maybe it was Russia or China, or maybe 100 other reasons for the internet outage. The reality is that a cut fiber optic cable disrupted 72% of landline and internet customers, while 26% had a total blackout.
In the aftermath of the internet outage, why do we care? If your business has multiple locations connecting to databases such as point of sales, your filesharing in the cloud, or numerous other reasons, your company was disrupted and probably had people sitting around doing nothing. I know many work-from-home employees that lost time and money because they couldn’t connect.
If you are a frequent reader of my blogs, you have repeatedly heard the drums about disaster recovery. While Disaster Recovery has been around since the mid-1970s, disaster recovery plans became necessary during the dreaded Y2K and became increasingly more important after 9/11.
The original plans were to upload backups to a new data center. They later evolved to more complicated disaster recovery plans to include major catastrophes, for example, a complete power loss in your data center, a bomb, a tornado, or anything that could take your data center down. With cloud solutions, the game changed significantly with High Availability, which made the need for DR plans not as critical in the minds of some leaders. But your plan is only as good as the connection to the cloud. Do you have a backup connection?
Today disaster recovery should also include business continuity which is how you will continue your business during and after a significant event. No matter what is happening in the world, from a pandemic to an internet outage, How will your business continue to function and make money?
There is no perfect plan. As your business grows, your plan will change and need updating with all your changes. If you don’t test, evaluate, verify, and validate your plan, you will never know if it will work for you when you need it.
While the State of Florida is reopening and more and more people are getting back to work, any business owner must start looking at the processes and procedures and make sure they are ready for the subsequent catastrophic failure from internal and external sources.
If you were recently affected by the Xfinity internet outage, it’s time to take a hard look at your company and how to overcome these obstacles in the future.
Do you have a Chief Information Officer that can help you? If not, maybe hiring a consultant like a Fractional CIO would be suitable for you. A good Fractional CIO can help you with all your policies, processes, and procedures and map out a roadmap to streamlining your IT in the future. A Fractional CIO can be better for a company, large or small because they bring with them the experiences of several companies. They also have the connections to get the best of the best consultants to ensure your company is safe, secure, and operating a peak performance.
At JAYCO CIO Services, we do much more than just planning; with years of experience in IT management, we can help you with Budgeting, Strategic Planning, Vendor Management, day-to-day operational issues, and so much more. Do you still need to figure it out? Let us assess your company and show how we can help. It’s a simple assessment and covers every aspect of your IT, and you will receive a report which spells out precisely what you need.
