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BCP or business continuity planning sometimes also called Business Continuity and Resiliency Planning is the process of protecting your business against disaster.

There are a lot of risks associated with running a business from competitors, and hackers to legal entanglements to natural disasters or power outages.  For my subject matter expertise, I’ll focus on the datacenter.

Your computing resources are hosted at a colocation facility or perhaps in the cloud.  So one part of BCP would be looking at redundancy and high availability.  Do you have two webservers, two database servers, two networks, routers, power systems.  Can you failover easily?  Have you tested the failover and documented the process?

Once you have considered the issues within your datacenter, you can look at bigger outages such as power outages, or general datacenter downtime.  Even with solid SLAs, mistakes do happen.  If your business can’t handle this risk, you can look at using multiple datacenters – say on the east and west coast, or perhaps on different continents.  In that case global server load balancing (GSLB) may work for you, allowing load balancing to bring you to the physically closest servers or datacenter to service your request.  In the event one of those datacenters is unavailable, all traffic will be routed to the available one.

As more and more deployments happen in the cloud, the process of failover and testing becomes more crucial.  And that’s a good thing.  With many clients I suggest doing a firedrill to run through all the disaster recovery steps.  This makes sure all your backups are complete, but more importantly that the process is well documented.  When an outage happens it’s not the time you want to put all the pieces of the puzzle back together, and figure out that one piece is missing.

Cloud deployments though push you to automate processes, create images of server configurations and generally script the process of spinning up new servers.  That’s because virtualization requires it.   That pressure will only serve to improve recoverability and thus support business process continuity further.

Book Review: Richard Florida – The Rise of the Creative Class

Florida’s idea of creative is wide ranging.  The folks he includes are everyone whose job involves creating new ideas, new technologies, or new content.  Well written and exhaustive, he provides an insightful look at the horizon of our changing job market and economy.

View The Rise of the Creative Class on Amazon

Considering proximate causes versus ultimate causes can help give us a sense of perspective.  When it comes time to assign blame, it often isn’t as cut and dry as we’d like.  Getting this sense of perspective might help us consider and formulate more constructive solutions rather than pointing fingers.

Oil Spills

With the oil spill all over the news in the last weeks, its easy to see this finger point.  What’s the proximate cause?  Perhaps a faulty valve is to blame.  If we look at larger causes of that, we see that regulation, oversight and checks and balances were missing.  But why drill in such a hazardous extreme environment 1 mile down?

Ultimately the cause is of demand for oil.  As a supply of easy oil dwindles, we search ever more remote locations for it.  So in essence each of us plays a part in this demand for oil.  Since complex technology and systems are inherently unstable, accidents are inevitable.  They can be mitigated, but there always remains a degree of error.  One might even argue that ultimate cause was an ever growing human population which needs energy to make food, which in turn is an inherent quality of living creatures.  So says Jared Diamond in his book collapse, discussing the rise, and fall of some past societies.

Diamond’s book is also a great example of constructive thinking on this topic, as he provides examples of some societies which pulled back from that edge, and how they did it.

Financial Instability

With the recent financial meltdown, a lot of fingers have been pointed too.  Everyone is looking to find the bad guy, and upon whom to assign blame.  But individuals or large financial firms have always taken risks.  Their whole raison d’etre is to find more and creative ways of making money, off of fees, leverage, or so-called arbitrage.  So that impulse is obviously nothing new.  Lack of regulation, perhaps the government is to blame?  True regulatory changes did usher in a new wave of gambling.  Many would argue not enforcing capital requirements allowed firms like Lehman to get so overleveraged in the first place.

But economists argue that ultimately capitalism is prone to cycles of boom and bust.  It also seems that those cycles are shortening.  And ultimately the internet and computerization of trading has played a huge huge role in speeding up the global economic machine in ways that we have yet to understand or unravel.

Tech Outages

Just as with these other complex systems we’ve described, computing systems have inherent complexity built into them.  Many web-facing applications have a fleet of database servers, webservers, load balancers, and many many interlocking software components interacting in a myriad of ways.

When a site outage happens they typically coincide with a huge spike in traffic, which means some spike in popularity or attention or focus to your services and business.  So it often happens to be the worst time for an outage.  So the pressure mounts when such an outage occurs to find a root cause.  Now obviously root cause analysis is important to help mitigate future problems, but we must be careful not to also assign blame too quickly along with that.  It is a very human knee-jerk reaction, but may miss the bigger picture.

An infinite amount and variety of QA and testing can be performed, and still not model what will happen in the real world.  Perhaps your users all started coming to your site because they wanted some specific piece of content that was suddenly indexed by google making your site the best result?  Or maybe a new feature was rolled out, but enough testing was not done to find one particular bug.  Or a developer added a new table without the proper index, making a heavily used part of the site an even heavier burden for the database.

Again as with the other scenarios we’ve described there are indeed root causes, but we also must consider the ultimate causes of complexity, and inherent failure built into such systems.

Conclusions

Proximate causes are in the details, they point to the specific event that triggered an outage, avalanche or other disaster.  But they do not provide the entire picture.  Only by considering the ultimate causes of and the complexity of the system as a whole along with proximate causes, can we can get perspective.  It is from that vantage point that we may build more constructive solutions to not eliminate all risk, but at least to mitigate it.

BOOK REVIEW – Seth Godin – The Big Moo

Seth Godin edits this little book of insights, including essays and new ideas from such luminaries as Malcolm Gladwell, Mark Cuban, Tom Peters, and Amit Gupta.

View The Big Moo

In a lot of different kinds of systems there are moving parts.  Electronics, automobiles, bridges and even living systems.  As it turns out in many if not most of these systems, the simpler designs tend to have various advantages over the more complex designs.  These benefits ring true in the business world as well.

Rock Climbing

Take the extreme sport rock climbing as an example.  I’ve been rock climbing off and on for about five years, though mostly indoors at rock climbing gyms.  One thing that you learn a lot about in rock climbing is safety.  There is a discussion of the harness, and how to double-back the waist cinch, and using multiple carabiners to lock into the rope, and then how to tie the rope in such a way that it tightens as it bears weight.  Both the person climbing and the person balaying – gathering the rope below – each have to take care of these things.  So generally they both check their own rope, harness, carabiners, and then check the other persons.

With indoor climbing this is all rather simple, and with just six checks for each climber to make, generally quite safe.  Plus there are monitors in the room watching people climb, and further checking for mistakes or oversights.  So over the years I’ve heard of practically *no* injuries in the gym.  It is so-called top-roping, and their are few moving parts.

With outdoor climbing you can do top-roping, however more advanced climbers prefer lead climbing.  It is much more challenging, and as I’ve described above there are many more moving parts.  The lead climber has to place “protection” into the rock every few meters.  These are special camming devices that grip into the rock.  Obviously all these components are not fool-proof, hence you want to add as many as possible.  But there are limits to endurance, and statistical averages at play, and more importantly many more moving parts.  So unfortunately lead climbing outdoors although possible to be on the safe side, tends to be much more prone to accidents.  More moving parts increases the statistical chance of a system breakdown.

iPhone

Something similar is at play when it comes to interface design.  With user interface or UI design, there is often a discussion of how many steps it takes to perform a function.  The more steps, the deeper the function is hidden.  Fewer steps means simplicity of design.

The iphone is a great example of this.  By simplifying the user interface, the machine works better.  At the Mobile World Congress last year Google announced that they get 50 times more searches from the iphone than *any* other mobile device.  Fifty times!  Think about that statistic.  This is more that flashy glitz and a pretty package.  This is a device that has fewer moving parts, not only in terms of buttons, but in the virtual interface components that a user navigates on the touch screen.

Internet & Engineering

Many of the same truisms that apply in the examples of rock climbing or smartphones also apply to internet systems, and the operations side of the business.  Can we use a web-services solution such a mailchimp.com to handle our email newsletter?  That means less to manage in-house, so our IT staff can focus on more important tasks.  Or how about outsource all email handling through a service like google’s Gmail for Business, or salesforce.com for CRM.

Simplifying your operations can also mean going with managing hosting solution, or better yet embracing the cloud with Amazon Web Services or Rackspace Cloud.   For that matter what database platform are you running on, or what computing platform?  Does it embrace the complexity and more  features philosophy?  Or does it strive for simplicity, and fewer moving parts?  And for that matter how many of those endless features are you actually using for your application?

Conclusion

As it turns out, engineers as much as business folks are wowed by endless features and the appeal of glitz and shine of a fancy new car.  But often in business what you need is reliability, simplicity, and fewer moving parts to get the job done, and get it done well.

The analogy du jour for cleaning up the financial mess is that sunshine makes the best disinfectant.  The idea is to push for more corporate transparency as a cleaning agent upon our current financial troubles.   Whether this cleaning job will have longstanding impact remains to be seen, however it’s clear that transparency is good for markets and economic stability.

In computing that same sunshine can be put to work as a disinfectant as well.  Transparency is as important for your cloud hosted application or traditional servers alike.  So how does it work?

Your typical internet application consists of a whole fleet of servers working together to do work for you.  Unlike automobiles, bridges, buildings or even most electronics however, the construction is constantly changing.  In effect these are buildings that are always being built, and bridges always being expanded.  Due to their changing nature, their behavior changes as well.  That’s where transparency comes in.

There are a number of great historical data tools specifically designed to capture the myriad of different metrics on your servers and then analyze and graph that information for you offline.  We like offline because that means the monitoring itself won’t affect or impact the performance of your application and servers.  Some of the tools of choice today include Munin, Cacti, and Collectd.  They each have their own strengths and weaknesses in terms of installation, configurability and so forth.  What they all have in common though is the transparency they provide.

Once installed, they will begin happily collecting information and monitoring your servers, all day and all night long even while you are enjoying your sunday brunch.

Are you looking at an outage that you encountered yesterday at 11pm?  Did your customers have trouble ordering your products, or utilizing your service? Fire up your cacti graphs, and drill down to that time window, and then review the various metrics to see what they reveal.

Having the right information at your fingertips is the first step in being able to resolve troubles.  Only with the right information can you fix these problems, and serve your customers what they expect.  So follow the analogy of using sunshine as a disinfectant and shine some light into your complex cloud environments. Let transparency lead you to the root of the problem and clean it up before it touches your customers.

Book Review:  The Ascent of Money – Niall Ferguson

When I think back to the dot-com days, I recall euphoria in people’s eyes.  It was that excitement in the face of making boat loads of money off the stock market that I remember clearly.  It is the excitement of the gambler, the thought of taking the shortcut, of getting something for nothing.  I remember seeing that same look in people’s eyes when they talked about housing just a short few years ago.  Talk of flipping houses and making money without adding anything.

It’s after the bubble bursts that everyone starts to think clearly again.  The tide has receded and we are left wondering how there could be bathers who weren’t wearing bathing suits, while it’s now plain for all to see.

Niall Ferguson’s book chronicles money’s use through history both the good and the bad.  By putting the current financial mess into historical perspective, he offers us new insights into our current predicament, helping us chart the way forward.  For anyone wanting to understand the financial forces around us, this is definitely a book worth reading.

It really is a golden rule in business that beyond all the tasks you will perform, the ideas you will discuss, and the people you will work with, you will leave a lasting impression of who you are, and what the experience of working with you is like. Strive always to be a pleasure to work with and you will surely find repeat business and plenty of word-of-mouth referrals too.

An abrasive genius

We’ve all had the opportunity to work with that individual who is quite bright. They may be hard working, driven to solve problems and good at completing tasks. However the abrasive ones might complain, put down those who don’t understand them, discount others ideas because they are sure their own are best, and generally be a bit of a sore spot on the team.

Over time the individual isn’t appreciated, no matter how hard they work because people tend not to like them, find themselves begrudgingly working with the person, think of the interaction as “dealing” rather than working together and so on. This person becomes insecure despite their great knowledge, and expertise, primarily because people feel negatively towards them. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

An average miss sunshine

Just as we’ve all had the experience of working with the abrasive genius we may also have the experience of working with mister or miss sunshine. They seem to always bring spirits up in meetings, tend more toward the positive, have a way of critiquing without criticizing, asking questions without tearing apart what you’re saying, and always seem likeable.

In fact we may even have experienced folks who are somehow average or worse at their job, perhaps even mess things up from time to time, but everyone is very forgiving of them because they are so very likeable?

Their warm personality will take them far. It encourages teamwork, collaboration, and makes them more confident as well.

Conclusions

So what’s the take-away? Well, why not be both? Set your sites on being highly skilled, but a pleasure to work with. Jack of all trades, but down to earth and easy to communicate with, and therein lies a formula for success and a true golden rule in business.

Book Review: Jeffrey Gitomer – Little Red Book of Selling

In truth, anytime you’re communicating with someone about something new, or when you’re both not “aligned” ie in agreement about something, you’re doing sales. You’re selling your argument, idea or perspective. So to in professional services, whenever you are pitching your expertise, talking about experiences with past clients, and so on it is all about sales.

What I like about Gitomer’s book is that it offers very down-to-earth advice, in easy to digest morsels. This book is not about the web, or specific advice about how to succeed providing a particular type of service, but rather how to succeed with people, how to work with people, how to impress and convey, and win over people so they will trust you, work with you, and in the end buy your services.

An excellent read all around, and an eye-opener for any of us not schooled in sales and/or marketing.

View Gitomer’s Little Red Book of Selling on Amazon