The other day I had some time between stops and decided to run through the car wash on my way to my next stop. This was one of those washes that has popped up in recent years where they have multiple wash options, a long tunnel with various different cleaning machines, and try to get you to sign up for a wash membership every time you’re there. I’ve been before so I was pretty familiar with the way they worked.
Upon pulling into the area where I select my wash on a touchscreen and pay, I quickly noticed that there was a problem. There were three lanes to purchase a wash, all of them several cars deep and none of them were moving. I knew something was not right, but I was now stuck in a one-way direction that I couldn’t get out of.
After a couple of minutes, several members of the wash team came out and went car to car and let each driver know that their wash had crashed and they were trying to reboot it! After a few minutes they manually raised the bars and allow the cars in line to continue on their way without the wash they had come for.
This experience reminded me that technology really is in everything, and having a solid disaster recovery plan is so important! We often think of having to reboot our computer every now and then just to solve those little oddities or quirks that occur after a while of use, but we don’t often consider that even things like the car wash run on computer. If you stop to consider the car wash example, by being down they couldn’t take payments, make wash selections, or even operate the wash itself. It was literally shut down and they were losing business by the minute.
In organizations, the car wash example goes to show that having redundancy, backups and a written disaster recovery plan is key to handling the inevitable system failure. In today’s world where your organization relies on technology for so much of your operation, downtime can severely impact an organization’s productivity or sales. For a school especially, this could mean a safety issue if you cannot access family information, medical information or emergency contacts for students in the event of an emergency.
LeadershipOne Technologies has the skills needed to help you think through reducing the risk of downtime and plan for the technical crisis that will come at some point. With these two items in place, you will reduce the risk of having a major system failure, but if it does happen you’ll be ready to get back up and running quickly!
Contact us today to set up a time to walk through your Disaster Recovery and Organizational Resilience planning!
