I have spent an interesting day at the Speciality and Fine Foods Fair at Olympia where my wife, Marilyn, has been speaking on marketing at one of the small business forums.

As well as eating myself silly with all the wonderful samples on offer, I did do some useful networking and had an interesting conversation with one of the exhibitors.

When I explained to him my interest in the Cloud, a rather wistful expression came over him – “I must be a soft target” he said. He went on to explain that recently his business had experienced a complete server failure.

I don’t know all the details but inspite of having a sophisticated setup with mirrored drives and offsite backup there had been a major event and the whole system failed. Whilst he had been able to replace the hardware, when it came to restoring the backup it was discovered that data was corrupt and the backup was virtually useless.

This is a common issue. How many businesses of all sizes actually check to see that, not only has their backup worked, but that it can be restored when needed. Without that compatibility check, a backup procedure is next to worthless.

And, of course, had he operated his business processes in the cloud, he wouldn’t have had an issue. Server failures would be someone else’s problem.

Another plus for the cloud – as for me, that chocolate stand looks rather interesting.
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