OMG! Technology Has Failed! Now, What Do I Do? by Cindy Stradling CSP, CPC
We’ve all come to rely heavily on technology. It saves us time and makes us more productive. However, it can also leave us dead in the water when it fails, especially if we don’t have good backup plans in place.
Here are some backup plans that might save you when technology has failed. 
- Have a list of tasks employees can perform when computers are down. Filing, clearing out old files and other paperwork tends to get behind anyway. Use the down time to catch up.
- Use backups. Employing backups and cloud storage is imperative for the small business. When technology in the office fails, you should be able to revert back to last night’s version of the data either on a separate hard drive, on the network backup, or on the cloud. Having yesterday’s data available to you is far better than losing everything.
- Paper files. Whether or not to keep paper files is a huge debate, and it really depends on the size of your business and whether or not it is feasible to keep paper files. Contracts and other important items may need to be kept on paper as well as in electronic format.
These three tips can help you survive during technology failures. Be sure to put together a plan, in writing, of the steps you’ll take to continue to function when you have a technology problem. These three items can help you, but won’t be as effective if you don’t have a game plan that lets employees know who should perform which tasks and under what circumstances your office will revert to backups, etc.
Once your game plan is written, go over it in a staff meeting to ensure each person knows exactly what to do and how to do it in each potential failure scenario.
Technology failures are not a matter of “if” but “when”. Eventually, no matter how careful you are, something will go down, at least for a short period of time. Technology failures can make people panic, losing even more productivity. But, there’s really no reason to panic, when you have a plan, and backup measures in place. You’ll be sailing along smoothly in no time.