Our flooded office experience

Another reason we love the cloud!

For those of you who have not been following our updates on Twitter and Facebook we were flooded on Friday afternoon (and again yesterday!) I know many of you are thinking "but how you are on the 1st floor!" Well the roof collapsed along the side of our building and water poured in to all of our interview rooms as well as all over reception! Now for some business owners this may spell tragedy. Afterall not only could you stand to loose everything on your computers but also all the physical files in your office! And then how do you work for the next few weeks until the Insurance assessors decide to approve your claim and your IT guys setup the new equipment for you?

But for us other than the issue of not being able to actually use our office its business as usual. Why? Our documents are all stored electronically and we use Cloud based services to run our business.

If we didn't use Cloud based software what could have happened?

Let's paint the picture. The office is flooding and we just have to leave. Our server is flooded with water which had all of our software, client files & records. Our physical files are also flooded and now can't be used. Let's also assume we have been diligent in backing up our systems to external drives or online. Firstly we would need to have a disaster recovery plan in place for our IT provider to use spare servers or something. We would have to wait until they could be fired up and ALL of our software and information were restored. We would then also need to setup our office somewhere that had access to these servers. Then we would need to get all of the quotes and hope the Insurance Assessor approved everything and that our Insurance Policies covered all of the loss. Then we would need to go through the whole process again when we could move back into the office.

What ACTUALLY happened for us!

We picked up our laptops on Friday afternoon and went out the door with them. Because we can work from anywhere we had not one hour of downtime and have enjoyed working from the coffee shop and our lovely park across the road just to name a few. We didn't have to worry about ensuring everything had backed up correctly. We didn't have to worry about disks to re-install software on computers. Other than where to see our clients we didn't have to worry about anything at all.

Lucky for us!

So what are the programs that made this all possible?

What would happen to you if your office flooded today? Would you be as lucky as us?

P.S if any of your are starting to get scared about what would ACTUALLY happen in your business let us know.....we can help implement solutions for your business just like we have for ours :)