Planning For Tech Outages | Fraser Valley Tech Support
You may have seen on the news, this week, that a bug-induced blackout took down a lot of high-profile websites. Among others, the outage hit Amazon, Reddit and the New York Times! The cause? One customer changed a setting which caused a previously-unknown bug to surface at Fastly, the cloud-computing company responsible for these websites. Tech Outages like this really don’t happen very often. And when they do, the company involved puts “all hands to the pumps” so they are rectified quickly. (In Fastly’s case, things were back to normal in less than an hour.)
But it does bring up the question as to how prepared you are for any outage. Especially one that can disrupt your business. Outages are an important part of your Disaster Action & Recovery Plan. Having a good contingency plan can save you money and time.
Now, this news story involved a website outage. However, when we are talking business-halting Tech Outages, you tend to think more of two other types – power and internet!
Power Outages
Power is probably the most important. After all, the one thing all technology needs is power! Power outages are usually unexpected but, thankfully, not too common in most of the Fraser Valley. If a power outage is a game-changer for your business, though, you should probably consider looking at a generator for back-up power.
Another very useful piece of equipment to protect your tech (and data!) in a power outage is a UPS. A UPS (or uninterruptible power supply/source) is a piece of electrical equipment that provides a cleaner power signal to your valuable electronics. It also provides emergency power when your main power source fails. We have a previous blog post that goes into a lot more details about UPS options, so you can learn more there!
When the Internet Goes Down
OK, so what about outage number two? The internet. As our operations move more and more to the cloud, losing internet is becoming much more of an inconvenience. However, this may be a much simpler fix. Many cloud-reliant business (wisely!) sign-up with more than one provider. So, here in the Lower Mainland, you will find many businesses that have both Shaw & Telus connections. A third back-up can be switching to cellular. The chances of all three of those going down are incredibly slim. We are talking solar flares, meteor strikes or alien invasions… in which case, you may have bigger things to worry about!
Disaster Action Plan for Tech Outages
When you are compiling a Disaster Action Plan for your business, it is easy to only focus on the big disasters (like flood, fire etc) and skip the small outage ones. But, these are probably the ones you will see the most! If you are a business owner in the Fraser Valley, and need help planning for tech outages, we can help! Call us on 604-210-9811 or email support@terravistatech.com.
