Like many people, I have a bucket list—things I want to do this year, next year, or before I find myself rocking on a porch chair. But I also have an unbucket list for my personal life. It’s a guide that helps me make decisions to avoid certain situations I never want to experience.

Recently, I realized that creating an unbucket list for my company might be just as important. Here’s what I came up with:

  1. Avoid paying a ransom.
  2. Avoid embarrassment due to a cyberattack.
  3. Prevent system downtimes.
  4. Avoid being humbled and left out in the cold.
    • This means eliminating single points of failure:
      • Only one person knows how to do a critical job.
      • Only one disaster recovery (DR) environment—like the AWS fiasco this week.
      • Causing disruptions that impact your customers’ businesses.

While thinking through this list, the recent AWS crash brought a wave of stress. We have DR and backups in place, except for one system that backs up data to an air-gapped environment. Our code is also backed up in an air-gapped location. We practice DR several times a year and update our documentation each time.

But even with all that, we still have a single point of failure.

It’s time to review our setup and develop a comprehensive air-gapped DR plan. Because being prepared isn’t just about having backups, it’s about ensuring those backups are truly resilient.

 

Let’s all learn from this and revisit our DR Plans. We can’t afford the downtime that issues from a vendor can cause.  Remember the cloud is run by humans. Humans are not infallible