On 20 December 2019, Truckstop.com went down after its security was breached. At the peak of the season, the online freight matching platform stopped working and thousands of businesses had to find an alternative. It took a week to bring back the service.
Twenty years earlier, a Pixar employee had deleted Toy Story 2. When they had tried to bring it back from backup, they had discovered that their backups were corrupt. In the end the movie was saved by a miracle—one of the staff had recently become a mother, and she worked a lot from home, and she had a copy of the movie there.
What do the two stories have in common? These are things that typically happen to young companies, which have inadequate disaster recovery procedures in place. As a new business grows, there are always things that have more priority than fixing some business processes that don’t look really necessary, given that things work. While people often understand the importance of disaster recovery procedures, they tend to postpone them for “tomorrow”. The probability of a disaster looks remote—until one actually happens.
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