On Monday lunchtime, following seven years of faithful service, the server at Sundial House suffered what can best be described as a catastrophic hardware failure.
An engineer would later tell us that the interface between the server and the hard drives had failed. The server was dead.
This is the server all seven of us at Sundial House rely on throughout the working day to manage client files, create reports and maintain our records. The failure brought us to a dead stop.
For any small business, the failure of such an important bit of technology can represent a disaster. Fortunately, we had a plan in place to cope with such an eventuality.
All of our data was backed up to three separate locations, so from the second the server died we had no concerns about the loss of any client or business data. You will be pleased to hear that this data is all encrypted to the highest standards, to safeguard the personal information we hold about our clients.
We have a good relationship with an expert computer support firm, who were able to quickly diagnose the fault, remotely at first on Monday afternoon and then by sending an engineer to our offices first thing the next morning.
By Tuesday afternoon we had agreed a plan of action with the computer support company, choosing to migrate our systems and data to the cloud, rather than rebuild our server or replace it with a new server.
Moving to the cloud has many advantages in terms of reliability and accessibility. It means that we will be able to access our systems from any location with an Internet connection. We look forward to being able to demonstrate cashflow modelling to clients from our iPads in the future, for example.
By close of play yesterday, the new system had been activated and all of our data migrated.
Today we have spent the morning ironing out a few remaining issues and we are pleased to report that we are back to 95% capacity from lunchtime today.
In the space of four days, we have gone from catastrophic hardware failure to fully operational cloud computing system. Without a documented and tested disaster recovery plan, and the expert support of an experienced IT company, it is very unlikely we would be in such a comfortable position.
Disaster can strike when it comes to Financial Planning as well.
Jobs can be lost, people can become ill or die, and unexpected items of expenditure can crop up.
Of course it is possible to insure to provide financial protection in many of these events, which helps to provide some cash or replacement income to cushion the blow.
What we should also all have in place is a personal finance disaster recovery plan, which enables us to switch to a tried and tested process for recovering from financial problems quickly and with the minimum of stress.
Working with a Financial Planner is a great way to understand the risks to your financial well being and put in place a robust plan to reduce these risks, or to cope with them easily should the worst happen.
Photo credit: Flickr/JessicaSarahS
