The Resilience of your Intelligence
Regardless of what department or area you work in it is critical that your company is set up to handle storms and disasters that may come. I’ve been following Hurricane Dorian, like many of you probably have been, and along with praying and hoping for the people in its path, I have been thinking a good deal about business resilience. Although your company may not be near a coast, you still have factors like flooding, fires, and tornadoes that could impact you no matter where you are. Or keep in mind, that if your business is near a future crime scene the building may get cut off until law enforcement is finished with their work. No matter where you are, the best thing you can do for your business is to mitigate the impact that could occur to the most probable issues around you and to the vendors you use.
If you’re out of the path of any current issues, then now is a great time to be thinking about the resilience of your company’s data. Most people think of backups as the way to go and if those are done then great you’re all set. But having a resilient business intelligence footing is more than just a backup strategy.
Here are three areas to think about to get you started becoming more resilient:
- Is our data stored in a place that has redundant servers and will be staying online throughout the current issue (ex. Cloud)?
- If your offices go offline is data still being processed and can our teams still see results with their mobile device? Just because you may not have an office, or power to that office, life around you still goes on. You need to make sure data is still flowing and people can still get to it if needed. Having your BI accessible from a mobile device that can hit a cell network if your local network is down is critical.
- Do we have any vendors that may experience issues during a storm or localized disaster that could impact our BI? Remember your data may rely on third-party vendors to process and deliver that data to you. If their sites and people are unavailable, will you be impacted? Can your BI system ingest backdated information once they are back online? Do they have a secondary location where they may send data from that may be outside of the norm…and if so can your system ingest that data with little trouble?
- People – your people are your greatest resources and if they have to take cover offsite and aren’t around to do some manual data processing, who is going to do it? Why are they having to do manual data processing anyway? Now is the time to think about automating this work so they can do more analytical work for you instead of just processing data.
Better to Plan Too Early Than One Day Too Late
There are a lot more questions to ask to really make sure your BI configuration can take be resilient through a disaster. As you know I’m a big Domo fan and handling the above issues through Domo is very easy to do. From reconfiguring a data import…and then back again…to accessing data reports on a mobile device…to automating your data ETL work, Domo makes it easy.
I hope this blog gave you something to think about and if you have some insight you would like to share with our readers, please include them below. If you would like to know more about Domo, feel free to reach out to me or your Perficient contact. Thank you.
