As we kick off our focus on Disaster Recovery for the next few months, we want to share a story about our own little disaster that occurred in August. This story illustrates that disasters can come in all shapes and sizes, and their impact can vary. So while you may not be in the path of the next destructive natural disaster, there are still ways your operations can be impacted.

On a Friday evening, after everyone had left the office for the week, a water hose detached from our refrigerator, spilling and spraying water across our break room. Going unchecked for a day and a half, the water spread into other areas of office – down hallways, into meeting rooms, and across the loading dock. Luckily, a staff member stopped into the office on Sunday morning and discovered the several inches of standing water, allowing us to start the cleanup a day earlier than if we had come into the office on Monday expecting everything to be as we left it.

Again, we got lucky with the impact. A few people got displaced and had to work from different cubicles, we had extra noise in the office from the fans for a couple weeks, our coffee maker broke so we had to create a work-around to fuel the caffeine needs of staff, and cleanup and repairs had to be made to the affected areas of the office. But, for the most part, it was business as usual.

There are a lot of “what if’s?” that could have increased the impact:

• What if we discovered the flooding on Monday instead of Sunday?
• What if it had been 5 inches of standing water instead of 3?
• What if the water had made its way into our server room?
• What if it was the sprinkler system raining across the whole office instead of a hose in the break room?

Would we have been prepared? Could we have gotten back to “business as usual”? If not, how much downtime could we (and our customers) have tolerated?

As we embark on this 3 month journey exploring Disaster Recovery, make sure you keep in mind that, while you may be safe from natural disasters, small disasters could happen at any time. Maybe it’s a flooded office, or a deleted file. Does your technology enable you to stay as close to “business as usual” as possible? Do you have a plan in place in case something does happen? If not, or if you don’t know, reach out to Mytech, and we can share some best practices with you, and ask some questions you might not have thought to answer.