Your Customers Are Ridiculous!

They may also be wonderful.

Or profitable (we hope).

But they are ridiculous.

They expect you to have ZERO downtime and ZERO data loss. That’s like 100%. Seven 9’s is cheaper…

How do I know this about your customers when I don’t even know them?

I know you.

When you log into Twitter, or Facebook, or LinkedIn…you expect all of your posts, tweets, and likes to be there. I’ve seen you freak out when the like count on the last brilliant thing you said went down instead of up.

I do it too ?

You don’t mind a missing post on Facebook? Its not the end of the world? True.

How about a missing paycheck from your bank? One electronic transaction missing vs. a different electronic transaction. Totally different level of freak-out.

Facebook…you go post on Twitter about it. 1st National Bank of YourTown – you’re in the bank president’s office ripping them to shreds and threatening to sue. Because your mortgage payment was missed.

See…you expected no data loss and no downtime from your bank….ever. And you didn’t know that is a crazy expectation.

The 100% expectation is inherent in humans, and its our job as businesses to get as close to it as we can. The more “9s” you need to guarantee, the more expensive it is.

In the tech world we have fancy acronyms for this: RPO and RTO. Recovery Point Objective (data-loss tolerance) and Recovery Time Objective (downtime tolerance). You need to set these numbers for each critical system and put the processes in place to make them happen.

Databases, Web Servers, Firewalls…all of it. They all work together to help keep your customers happy, rather than having them come unglued because you lost their data.

Once you have all that in place…test it.

Comments welcomed and encouraged

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

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