Sometimes the Web services you rely on crash… or get taken down by the feds (sorry, Megaupload.com!). Be ready before it happens to you.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) sparked massive amounts of online protest and left politicians running for cover. And then the feds shut down Megaupload.com, a major file downloading site for alleged piracy of copyrighted works.
What do they both have to do with your business? Maybe more than you think. Many corporate employees used Megaupload, according to one study, and the site accounted for a quarter of Web-based file-sharing. Perhaps some number of those employees were downloading episodes of “True Blood” and “The Simpsons,” but it’s also likely there was some actual work going on.
That’s the problem. Companies come to depend on popular Internet tools and services that sometimes have less than pristine provenance. Even if federal agents aren’t walking in with subpoenas and confiscating servers, there are plenty of other things that can go wrong with a service provider, from catastrophic storms (remember how weather in Japan and Taiwan hampered the electronics manufacturers last year) to the ordinary outages that even happen on Amazon’s cloud services.
Here are some steps to take to ensure that your company keeps up and running, even when important technology service providers don’t.
…to read this article in full, visit leading US small business resource, Inc.
