Zombie proof your business

This week , Brad Pitt is putting his money and reputation on the line with the release of his blockbuster production World War Z.   I have been reading the book in anticipation of the movie, and I am looking forward to how they will transform Max Brooks’ book into popular entertainment.  While I was reading along, it struck me that a great deal of wisdom can be gleaned from a fictional zombie apocalypse. As a small business person, the unforeseen and the unexpected happen constantly. If you are not careful, your business can wind up like the Walking Dead.  In this post, I want to talk about how cloud-based services and changes in the technology sphere can help you avoid this tragic fate.

The biggest challenge for any business is how to deal with disaster recovery.  If a fire, earthquake, or flood hits your business, how are you going to get back up and running?  Larger companies have decided that they are going to create large data centers resembling Fort Knox.  Massive Batteries, multiple generators, and numerous systems are in place.  In fact, these facilities are filled with backups and redundancies that the only way to stop business is to have an asteroid directly strike the building or a massive civil disruption, like a zombie apocalypse, to shut down the entire power grid.

As a software developer at the turn of the century, I thought all these precautions were an overreaction.   My opinion changed overnight in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.  Merrill Lynch lost four employees to the attacks, but the terrorists nearly destroyed the company, causing it to lose over $98 million in the course of a tragic morning.  Data centers and disaster recovery became a very serious business. No one anticipated the terrorists flying a plane into the building with your data, but now it was a genuine possibility.

Over the last decade, as data centers grew, they had surplus space and power.  Being good capitalists, these companies began leasing their extra space to smaller companies.  Cloud computing was born.  Soon, companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft got into the act and became the principal suppliers of cloud services.  Prices fell, and up-time increased.  This was technology and the marketplace doing what Adam Smith said it would.

As a small business myself, for a few hundred dollars a year, I have the computing power which would have cost several hundred thousand dollars during the giddy days of the dot-com boom.  It allows me to stay in business as I look for customers.  I also know that my data is secure because it exists in a data center in the Pacific Northwest. If something happens to me or my business, like a zombie attack, the survivors can access the data and information with a few passwords.  You can have this security too.  At E₃ Systems, we have inventory management and fleet management software safely hidden away on the cloud for you to use. If something happens to your facility, you will be ready to do business the next day.

Contact us today , and we will show you how this is more exciting than a zombie apocalypse.

Until next time.