Still here...

Unfortunately I haven't managed to post any updates recently, but we are still here. The end of the year is quite a busy time, and we've been having IT troubles recently dealing with the potential security issues in Internet Explorer.

Which brings me to a little thing called business continuity. Your business may be interrupted by any number of little things - staff illnesses, power cuts, server crashes, and even the loss of the internet, let alone earthquakes and other natural disasters.

It's remarkable how something seemingly as minor as losing web access can have quite a significant impact on your work. The internet isn't just for slacking off, you know! I felt a bit lost without it, especially since we'd had five earthquakes in very short order on one day, and then weather warnings on another, and I couldn't check GeoNet or the MetService's webpages to see what was going on. I didn't really realise how often I used it until it suddenly wasn't there.

The trick is to work out other ways of doing things. Have you got another way of carrying on if something is missing? Can you work from paper if your computer stops working? Have you got people to call on if others are sick? Will everything fall over if you aren't there? The usual procedure of going for coffee when the servers crash, just isn't going to work if the servers are going to be down for days. What if you ran an internet cafe? The loss of the internet would mean loss of business.

Think along the lines of "it would be really annoying if I didn't have X" - and come up with a way to work around it, then think of something that it would be worse to do without and come up with a plan for that, even to the point of having some kind of plan for what to do when your business can no longer function at all.

I eventually found another source of internet (my home laptop), but other solutions may have been ringing GeoNet and the MetService (actually talking to someone!), getting faxes etc. There are ways to work around most things - often the old fashioned way.

We've gotten used to the conveniences of modern technology and we rely on it an awful lot. Despite not getting any calls on my cellphone for days, maybe even weeks, I'll still feel paranoid if I leave it at home...