Restarting the free accounting search

Posted Jul 31, 2017 14:24 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Restarting the free accounting search by felixfix
Parent article: Restarting the free accounting search

I just went through a round of "business continuity" planning with my employer. They take this stuff very seriously, and I can categorically state that they consider legionnaire's disease a complete non-issue.

Yes, absolutely anything can go wrong at any time. That's why you make contingency plans, prioritized based on their likelihood. That's why, living in a place prone to hurricanes, I have a week's worth of supplies stashed in two different counties, generators (and fuel), and even portable A/C units. Along with plywood, tarps, and a decent chainsaw. And nobody is ever surprised by a hurricane!

The only way I can mitigate against a failure of an external service is to bring it in-house. For some things (eg accounting, short-term power loss) that's practical. For others, it's not.

Restarting the free accounting search

Posted Jul 31, 2017 16:02 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (3 responses)

You've done continuity "planning" but have you actually had to cope ?

Legionnaire's looks at first glance much less devastating than, say, a big fire, but in both cases and many others the only way your business will actually have any real continuity is if it's inherently multi-site. That means in _practice_ not in theory there are several distinct physical locations from which all core elements of the business operate.

Most businesses are far too small for that, so in _practice_ their continuity plan for a lot of eventualities is "Go bankrupt". My favourite burrito place in London was flooded out, went bankrupt shortly after re-opening. It doesn't matter that they didn't cause the flood, or that they worked their backsides off to re-open as quickly as possible, the damage was fatal to the business.

Restarting the free accounting search

Posted Jul 31, 2017 17:49 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

And, coming back round to the topic of cloud services, "go bankrupt" is a perfectly good continuity plan for a sufficiently unlikely eventuality (it was my previous employer's continuity plan for "what happens if our site is hit by a nuclear explosion", for example). The question then becomes whether or not a failure of any given cloud service is sufficiently unlikely that "go bankrupt' is a reasonable continuity plan.

You also have to have a reasonable assessment of the likelihood of your outsourced service failing as compared to (e.g.) your in-house service being hit by a catastrophic failure. Accounting in the cloud makes business sense if the likelihood of your cloud service failing is much smaller than the likelihood of any in-house service suffering a terminal failure.

This does, BTW, currently tend towards preferring big centralised services; if (to choose a random example) Salesforce.com goes under, your creditors are much more likely to accept that this is an exceptional event worthy of offering special terms than if your office server explodes in a shower of sparks and cannot be replaced in a reasonable time period. Not least because there's a decent chance that your creditor can't tell what you owe them until they recover from the shock, too.

As a non-business example, my continuity plan for "home hit by a hurricane" is "panic!".

Restarting the free accounting search

Posted Jul 31, 2017 17:55 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> You've done continuity "planning" but have you actually had to cope ?

We came close -- Last summer, a hurricane turned a few degrees to the north at the last moment and missed us entirely. Since then, the worst has been a power outage and an internet service outage, each completely shutting us down for about half a day. (Ironically, the same things that make us more resilient to major disasters makes us more vulnerable to the more run-of-the-mill stuff..)

But your point about being multi-site is well taken; our "continuity" plans only really work because we're so geographically dispersed. Fortunately, this particular site has never had to go into full disaster _recovery_ mode.

(BTW, I am familiar with how bad Legionniare's can get, having had a rather close encounter with it in my youth)

Restarting the free accounting search

Posted Jul 31, 2017 19:56 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

(BTW, I am familiar with how bad Legionniare's can get, having had a rather close encounter with it in my youth)

When I was a student at Edinburgh University in the late 1980s, Legionella bacteria were found in a water tank of the air-conditioning system that served the university's computing centre. This was during an early summer that by Scottish standards was quite warm, and running the computers without air conditioning was not an option. Hence the computing centre was duly shut down for at least a week – I don't quite remember the specifics – so the A/C units (all of them) could be thoroughly sanitised. While the operations staff tried to keep a rudimentary service running, this was a huge hassle as lots of people had exams and deadlines for papers or projects coming up and couldn't do the requisite work. For a company, it would probably have been even more of a problem.

So, Legionnaires' disease is not to be trifled with. I don't think anybody actually contracted it at the time, which was just as well.