Story-telling is a vital ingredient in selling. In a hyper-competitive market, good stories win. Disasters are riveting stories on the news.
Katrina, Superstorm Sandy and, most recently, the tornadoes in Oklahoma have riveted the nation. There has been an outpouring of love, money and support after each catastrophe.
The business story has been about cloud services. When I look at the devastation in Oklahoma, I wonder how many people had stored their photos and videos online somewhere. Those memories would be lost in this destruction if they weren’t stored online. (And Flickr just overhauled their service.)
How many people in Oklahoma worked from home? These folks are now homeless and office-less. I hope that at least their contacts were stored online.
In telecom, we talk about disaster recovery and business continuity, but we don’t tell a really good story.
There are studies that demonstrate the loss of a customer database is the end of a small business – literally, the end. Without customer records, a small business is done. Think about how troublesome it is when you lose your cellphone or it gets wiped on a reset (and you use your contacts)? Personally, you have LinkedIn (News - Alert), Facebook and Outlook to recover some of those files from. All of that recovery comes from cloud apps.
The 2013 Atlantic Hurricane Season started on June 1. In April, Weather Services released their predictions for 16 named storms, nine hurricanes and five intense hurricanes.
Business continuity planning can be a good side line for a channel partner. Data storage and backup make quite a few value-added resellers (VARs) a lot of money.
After each disaster, it gets harder to tell yourself that it can’t happen to me. The evidence is all to the contrary. It CAN happen to you. And if it does, what is your plan?
In California and Florida, the power companies’ rolling black outs to ease afternoon constraints cause big problems for consumers and businesses. It isn’t enough to have battery backups. Your data better be safeguarded and backed up off-site. Those power surges can destroy electronics.
Think about how upset you are when you didn’t save a document or blog. Imagine that ten-fold when your database is gone or your file server or your email server. Help your customers by not just offering DR/BC, but painting the picture for them of what can happen before an event occurs.
Peter Radizeski is a telecom consultant and the owner of RAD-INFO (News - Alert), Inc.
Edited by Alisen Downey
