In case you missed it and we certainly hope you did as that means we did our job is that the office experienced a short term internet outage recently. This is a quick summary of what happened.
During a storm a limb hit the cable line to our office building. We did not lose phone or power but at about 12:30 pm we lost our main connection to the internet. We reported the outage and they said they would have it up within 48 hours. I had heard lots of news alerts on the radio that there were a lot of lines down from the storms. The long time frame did not bother me because we still had access to the internet through another means. I thought this would be an ideal time to see how well our Disaster Plan would work in real life. I contacted those two clients whom I had scheduled to meet at the office and rescheduled either to a different time or place. I then spent a very productive afternoon getting other projects done without the distraction of the internet.
Before leaving the office I forwarded the office phone to my cell phone; I put a note on the door instructing any visitors to contact me either at my work or cell phone number as we were experiencing difficulties at the office. I spent the next morning working from home where I could finish up a project that required some research from the internet and would be easier to do from home than at the office without the main internet connection. My bookkeeper and I arrived at the office at noon to take care of any office visitors and we continued mostly normal operations.
It was the T3 Conference in Dallas this year that Joel Bruckenstein said something that caused me to rapidly accelerate our move to the cloud. If I may paraphrase Joel: “Who has better security and does better due diligence on cloud services.” The security aspect struck me as particularly important. While I can encrypt data and lock up the server and the building has a burglar alarm. Someone could break in and steal that server and be gone before the cops ever arrive. Couple this with the fact I wanted access everywhere and we made the decision to move to the cloud sooner rather than later. The first thing we did was speed up our move to Salesforce which got our CRM in the cloud. The second thing was a secure backup we could access from anywhere and a tweet about SafeSync for Business from Joel and his article in the March 2012 issue of Financial Advisor and it seemed like we had a good fit and we were soon backing everything up to the cloud using a new service with better features than our old one. Those two changes made our internet outage seem like a minor inconvenience. The key to making what could be a major disruption a minor inconvenience is having a robust Disaster Plan.
Our Disaster Plan required us to have another connection to the internet if our main line went out. We have two: a MiFi device from Verizon and an iPad with unlimited data connection with AT&T so overall we have three different networks we can access at any time. Unfortunately, the MiFi was at the beach in Florida during this outage as Colleen was on vacation and wanted to have internet access should the need arise. I had the iPad and so had access to the internet wherever I went. Normally we would have set up my coworker’s laptop and the MiFi and be good to go. This is where my only real stumbling block occurred as I realized I did not have an easy way to integrate the iPad with the office network. This manifested itself when I needed to print a form and could not easily do so at the office. I realize there are apps to work around this but they required either WiFi or Bluetooth access to the printer and we do not have a wireless network at the office for security reasons. I am now looking at option around this minor inconvenience. I also realized that if this were to happen again I would get a keyboard for the iPad. My home, which is our designated backup office in case our current location is unusable, also worked well the one morning I worked from home. Call forwarding worked perfectly and no one knew I wasn’t in the office.
The next afternoon a surly & unpleasant tech arrived to put up our cable line which was not actually down. He left since he apparently did not have the right tools and scheduled another tech to come by the next day. The next morning a very pleasant tech soon arrived and after determining that my 2 month old modem was working properly went up the ladder to the pole where he noticed our cable connection had worn out and he replaced the connection. The internet still wouldn’t work so he replaced the line since the problem was between the pole and the building. That didn’t fix the problem so he had to replace the port at the pole which had gone bad and that fixed our main line internet.
We learned a few lessons and found some weaknesses in our current Disaster Plan. We are actually thankful the event occurred as it proved that our plan would work and that our decision to move to the cloud has already paid off. We are already looking at options for Portfolio Management and Analytics that can be done in the cloud so we can finish moving all of our operations to the cloud. This is becoming all the more important as I read more about Windows 8 and how it is not optimized for business productivity but for touch screens and being a passive user of technology. I am also in the midst of updating our Disaster Plan to integrate what I learned in this unexpected test of the plan.
If you or your business needs a Disaster Plan feel free to contact us and we would be happy to discuss this issue with you.