Your cloud service is going to die right when you need it
One of the things I hear again and again doing internet support for 20+ companies that occupy the same building is that their normally completely reliable cloud service has gone out and they’re wondering if our internet is somehow to blame. I’ll give you a hint: in 23 years at this location it’s been our internet once because of a local DNS server problem, every other time it’s been the tenant/client’s service.
Google Docs disappears during a presentation, Amazon Web Services go down while someone’s trying to pull a demo site up, Gmail goes down, or in the rare case someone decides to detonate a bomb five miles from you and takes out the internet and phones for two weeks.
What can you do? Save some stuff locally dude. That’s it. Important presentation? Invest $13 in a USB drive and copy your presentation. Got a website or app presentation you’ve got to do? Record it and have it on said USB drive. Documents you need to access? Copy ’em down. You can even automate syncing to the USB drive as a backup for your cloud service.
But I see time and again people completely derailed because their web service went down… and it’s always “must be the IT guy’s fault somehow.” Always. Never “I didn’t spend 2 minutes copying to a USB drive in case there was an internet issue so ended up wasting 54 hours of attendees time at a meeting where I had to mime a presentation of an app.”
And yeah, I can make $0.60 if you click that USB link and buy something, but that’s not the point. Make it a habit to assume the internet is going to die, and you won’t be left standing in front of a blank projector when it does.
You can invest thousands in backup cloud services to prevent this, or spend two minutes copying to a cheap USB drive.
That’s it, getting off my soapbox.
