My cousin and I decided to purchase a start-up company together. He is the brain of the operation, and I am its funding. He takes care of everything that has to do with the actual service, and I make sure that we make our money off of it.
Although the general rule is that one should avoid mixing family in with business, this case is an exception to the rule because there are not to many people like my cousin. You see, he is a computer and internet genius, and I’m just fine when it comes to handling finances.
One day, however, I realized how incredibly lucky I was to have him as my cousin and partner. We were sitting in our office when suddenly, all of the computers in our office showed a flashing screen saying “alert: virus uploaded,” and before we knew it our entire system and framework was being destroyed by a virus. My cousin jumped into action and shut off all connections to the Internet, except for his computer.
He managed to work his magic as he always does, and he was even able to trace the source of the virus, which apparently was some obscure office building in Oklahoma. He was even able to detect which computer in the office it came from.
My cousin, right then and there, contacted the office head in Oklahoma and notified him of what had happened and explained to him that he either immediately fire the individual who works at that computer or else he will send the virus back home to where it came from. Action was, of course, immediately taken.
While this was going on, my heart sank. I had just witnessed the near collapse of my private empire. In just a few moments, years of tireless effort and work could have completely vanished before my eyes.
This got me to thinking about what if my cousin would not have been my partner or perhaps if he was not available at that exact minute or couldn’t handle the speed of the virus. This thought was absolutely horrific because it meant that we had neglected to defend our network altogether and that we were our own worst enemy.
We had no back up system whatsoever nor did we have any disaster solution plan. All we had was my business strategy and my cousin’s brains, which meant that we would have had to start from scratch. The benefits of a business continuity plan are many, and it is more than worthwhile to invest the time to research them.
Elmore R. Remington is a disaster recovery solutions expert and is the author of many different programs that help businesses keep the business running in times of need. For more information about the benefits of purchasing business continuity software view the Evergreen Data website online. Elmore is an SEO specialist based with SEO services group ClickResponse.