One Man Band

One of the virtues of the Internet that enables the existence of Do-It-Yourself Online Business for One is virtual proximity: everyone is right next door on the Internet. You can happily outsource everything about your business except your own creative spark.

But.

What happens to your One-Man Band if an earthquake takes out an undersea cable or eight? Do you know?

According to an article by Jason Dean in today’s deadtree edition of the Wall Street Journal, precautionary redundancies in some cases failed to carry the load after an earthquake near Taiwan damaged undersea cables:

International phone service was cut off or restricted in some regions, and Internet service slowed to a crawl in much of China after the magnitude 6.7 temblor struck late Tuesday, followed by several aftershocks, damaging as many as eight undersea cables. Service to BlackBerry mobile email devices and Bloomberg financial-information terminals was interrupted, and some transactions in currency and other financial markets were disrupted.

The repercussions of a single natural event that, while killing at least two people, caused limited physical damage, highlights the continuing fragility of telecommunications at a time when businesses are ever-more reliant on far-flung operations and vendors. Even some of the system redundancies designed to back up primary undersea sable networks failed to work, experts say.

What happens if a hurricane blows over transmission lines on the Gulf Coast? Do you know how that might impact your One-Man Band?

If a killer snowstorm shuts down Colorado (what a thought!), will it also shut you down?

Lesson of the day: disaster-recovery planning is not the sole province of The Big Guys. Know the geographic location of your distributed assets, stay apprised of threats to same, and have Plan B ready. (You do have business-interruption insurance, right?)