Companies are always looking for ways to avoid the unthinkable; a fire that burns the business to the ground and takes with it priceless documentation, customer records, plans and financial data. Regardless of what we think our odds are, often times, the price of poor disaster planning and recovery can be a mortal wound to the entire enterprise.

The Cold, Hard Truth
Disaster recovery has long been perceived the giant black hole of IT spending with no real metric to prove its value. Good DR is seen as the playground of larger, monstrous organizations and less of a worry for smaller companies, but the reality of the matter is that without a DR plan, your business is at catastrophic risk. So, to set the record straight, disaster recovery is as important to small business as is good succession planning.

This brings us to the ultimate conundrum: most companies can't afford the level of DR that their business requires, thus, the business can't support the cost of continuity, so the risk is taken. I have an idea that could resolve that...

Using Pirated Music to Save Your Business

For the past decade, millions of minds and hours have been devoted to figuring out how to share millions of 3MB MP3 files around the world, regardless of if their host machine was on, regardless of whether one network was down, another up, another slow, etc. The fruit of this pirate revolution has been a very controversial tool that I believe holds an amazing possibility for file-based disaster recovery.

"BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) communications protocol. BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the entire costs of hardware, hosting, and bandwidth resources. Instead, when data is distributed using the BitTorrent protocol, each recipient supplies pieces of the data to newer recipients, reducing the cost and burden on any given individual source, providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing dependence on the original distributor." [Source: Wikipedia]

Sounds great, right? You create a 'torrent' from the original file (whether music mp3, DWG, PDF, etc.) and post that torrent. Any accessible machine pulls the file and 'seeds' the torrent, regardless of how much it has downloaded of the file. If the alternate host machine only pulls 9% of the file, it seeds or provides anyone the ability to pull that first 9% from that machine, then the balance from somewhere else. The great part about all of this is that one infrastructure doesn't provide the backbone and bulk of data resuscitation, should your machines poop out, rather, the entire infrastructure sees what it has and can assemble it from redundant pieces of that file all over the P2P network. Brilliant. This entire mess of a solution means that even the production manager's machine, that 2 year old, out of the box Dell can provide criticality to the DR network. And if it happens to be off... well, the P2P network will heal itself.

It Takes a Village... of Computers
The fact of the matter is that without many nodes on many different data connectivity backbones, infrastructures, etc., this solution doesn't work. The cool part about all of this is that if there's one thing international networks of companies have... it's computers, and tons of them.

So, my solution (or seed of one rather, feel free to take my 'torrent' and 'seed' it out an anyone ; ) is basically this: utilized a closed, secure version of a P2P network utilizing the torrent file distribution underpinnings, centralize the network management and authentication only and rely on the business infrastructure of machines and equipment to handle the distributed bulk (and intense cost) of full disaster recovery. By doing this, we become a tighter, more reliant network while at the same time minimizing our cost, if any, in big iron machines and data recovery costs...

This is just the genesis of an idea, but one I would love to explore. If you have more to add to this conversation, please comment and let's begin an open forum of ideas... visit [the rockpile] at http://tannerlee.blogspot.com/ and let's start the construction P2P revolution!

All the best,
Tanner

In the past few weeks, my company has been working with a partner ad agency here in St. Louis to execute the largest project we've ever had to date. The end customer is a consumer products company with revenues in the billions and they've hired us to complete their online presence. A complex site, the project calls for an immense amount of collaboration, communication and conflict management. The problem, however, is that the customer has an 'in-house', on-retainer IT organization that, in my humble opinion, is antiquated in their practices and technologies (which is precisely why the customer has involved us). This entire mix of players; the customer, the ad agency, the internal IT and little old us is a ticking time bomb for contention...

Many times in our own businesses, especially if we're attempting to be innovative and iconoclastic, we run into issues that make us question whether or not its all worth it. With this project, we've been blamed, yelled at, misled and altogether man-handled by the internal IT team that thinks we're trying to squeeze them out. At first, my reaction is to assert our validity, correctly assign blame and move on, developing a tighter relationship with the customer and the agency and leaving the IT group out to dry. At the end of the day, however, that path doesn't jive with my conscience or my Christian faith, and I hope it doesn't yours.

The fact of the matter is that there are times in business that a choice must be made. A choice not reflective of your ledger, not reflective of your sales pipeline, but rather a choice made with your heart. Many, many a wise and smart business owner has taught me, and I have learned from experience, that businesses are made and destroyed through personal relationships, nothing else. So... I chose to bond a relationship. I accepted my (undue) share of the blame and in that action, attempted to showcase my devotion to the overall relationship to the internal IT group as well as the customer and my partners... the result? Exactly what you'd expect; all is well again and everyone's all smiles.

Sometimes its hard to take undue blame for actions that aren't expressly yours or to turn the other cheek to a partner/customer you know isn't being just in their actions, but always remember that actions speak louder than words. People are just people, regardless of title, post or otherwise and people know and respect a humble action more than any words that can be uttered. Take your time, listen to your customer, but always remember that there are more jobs, more customers, more opportunity. Keep your faith, morals and ethics as your guiding light and you'll never have to apologize or lose sleep for any of your business's actions.

All the best,
Tanner