Planning Ahead

Preparing to attempt to avoid "emergencies."

One of the discussions I have been having with one of my clients is that we cannot always justify taking as much time to do something as we want. One just needs to think about an ambulance on their way to an auto accident. Time is of essence, it is life or death in some cases.

The key is that the ambulance is ready before hand. The ambulance is stocked with supplies. The ambulance personnel are trained and ready to go. They minimize what might go wrong while they are not in an emergency.

I have been giving this a lot of thought. Certainly backups are part of the preparation for a business to be ready for a potential emergency, as in the case of a computer crash which the client just experienced.

Having a good backup strategy is a good start. However, we may want to go even further. In space, many systems are redundant since there is no way to get things fixed quickly. When I used to work at GE Space Division, the saying was "It is hard to find a ladder to reach a satellite if something breaks down."

Of course NASA has much more of a budget than most of us will ever have, so we cannot justify going that far. But the question is how far do we want to go?

It might make sense for a critical employee to have two computers, both validated, and both loaded with the software needed, and both able to access the "data" on a file server. Both of these computers are ready to go. If one goes down, the employee uses the other until the first one is fixed or if necessary replaced.

A key point is that this planning takes place ahead of time. The proper analysis is made when we have the time to think about it. When we implement the redundant systems (and the necessary backups), we make sure everything is working (including file recovery).

Then, when we are in the middle of a critical project, and we have a crash, we implement our "switch over" plan, and continue working.

The hard question is how much insurance is enough. No real easy answer for that one!