Dec
17 Single Point of Failure
Single Point of Failure...
Dreaded words, but a fact of life for many small companies.
Truck Number:
How many employees being hit by a truck on the way to work would it take to shut your company down?
If the number is 1, you are pretty vulnerable, and that employee should be asking for a raise. If that person is the owner, well, then, you have a job, not a business.
Of course, I am "preaching to the choir!" I am bootstrapping North Creek Software, and very few people understand my vision, and fewer understand my code. Our truck number is most definitely 1.
Back to Single Point of Failure (SPOF). If employees are a SPOF, you may be limited in what you can do. If there is a technical SPOF (a server, a router, a power source) it is up to you to determine whether the price of diversifying that function can be justified, given the likelihood of failure of that SPOF.
My power went out for about 30 minutes at home today. I found other things to do, but it delayed this blog post and caused me to go through the restart process for a couple of home servers (development and test). Next month, while I'm in an active Beta, that will be a problem, but for now I can deal.
One of the benefits of moving to a SaaS product or to custom software is that things can be backed up, moved off-site, and made available via redundant servers. If you depend on your file server sitting in the corner, you have a SPOF. If you run everything through a spreadsheet, you have a SPOF if that spreadsheet gets corrupted. You have backups, but you are talking about losing work and filling in a gap.
I understand that your budget / amount of mental space you have for this problem may be limited. Moving documents to a repository solves a lot of issues. Moving to a smart repository turns things into a win-win.
North Creek is building that smart repository. Get in on the ground floor, email me, or contact me via Facebook or Twitter. My LinkedIn account also links back to this blog. Help me steer this project.
Talk to you soon.
Categories: Business