Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's largest provider of internet-based computing services - almost 150,000 companys use AWS. Companies such as Netflix, Spotify, Pinterest, Buzzfeed, and Amazon (go figure), use this service. When AWS had an outage yesterday, it affected hundreds of thousands of businesses! Dave Bartoletti, a cloud analyst with Forrester, told USA Today: “This is a pretty big outage. “It’s got north of 3 to 4 trillion pieces of data stored in it.” That's a lot of data!
Fortunately, for our customers that have products utilizing AWS, they are on a system that offers an offline solution or a solution that still runs even if internet is down.
However, this is a great reminder that it is time to review the disaster plan for your business. You have one, right?
Many disasters can befall a small business (power outages, earthquakes, internet outages, fires, security breaches, etc.), but few are worse than losing vital business information. Imagine losing your entire customer list, your accounts receivable data, your sales or payroll data, your menu setup, or your inventory records. You could spend weeks –even months - reconstructing this data. In a worst-case scenario, you might not be able to reconstruct it at all. If you are on one of our hosted solutions, many of these worries go away.
In today’s highly-computerized business world, many firms are exposed to the sudden loss of information. Natural disasters, computer viruses, mechanical failures and electronic crime can all result in catastrophic data loss. No matter how hard you try, you can’t prevent disasters from occurring. But you can take forceful steps to safeguard your data, and ensure that you can retrieve and restore your computer records should you suffer a loss.
