A Lesson In Being Prepared

Stick with me, it has business relevance I promise. 

Last weekend I got a lesson in being prepared. My wife got pregnant back in September and started packing her hospital go bag about 6 months later. I just chuckled and said we had plenty of time. I would jab at here about it from time to time. Some of you see where this is going. Well, our son decided he wanted to enter the world 5 weeks early. (No worries, both mom and baby are happy and healthy.) Well guess who got the last laugh and guess who was the one scrambling to get their stuff packed? Hint, the one laughing first was not the one laughing last. My point?  Are your IT systems ready for disaster, failure, or loss? When was the late time you tested your backups? Do you have recent backups? If your network equipment is in high availability, have you brought one down to see what happens? If your equipment in not in HA, do you have a recent config backed up so you can get up and running quickly? What about your critical servers? Are your snapshots good? When was the last time you tested your DR plan? Do you even have a DR plan at all? When if you get ransomware and all your systems are encrypted? Can you recover without paying the ransom? Think it will never happen to you, think again. It can and it will in some form or another. Systems fail, firewalls go belly up, and even with the best security the bad guys get in and will demand money from you. A good DR plan is like insurance, you never really appreciate it until you must use it. Don’t get in the habit of saying, “I will get to that tomorrow” because tomorrow may be too late.