Does your recruitment software provider expect disaster?
We all have it in the back of our minds. What happens if the server goes down? Will I lose my data? Will I be able to work that day?
All software as a service companies look the same on the outside.
Did you know that over 60% of our Hosting budget is spent on strategies to cope with a disaster. So in the 6 years we have been in business we have spent a fortune on something that has never happened. We could have winged it some would say and I know I would not have slept as well over the years, however what would happen if the server you were on did go up in a puff of smoke? How could we justify being a market leader in recruitment software databases if you could not access your data or even lost your data. That’s why a large part of our budgets go on scenarios that may never ever happen.
Imagine this scenario. You invest in some software and are happily paying your monthly fee. One day the website is down and you can’t work. You call the vendor and they explain that the server you are on is damaged and they are working hard to restore service. If you are in this situation I can guess that you may be waiting at least 8 – 12 hours for service to be restored. Why? The vendor has not thought about a disaster plan. They probably have 1 server and hope for the best whilst they maximise their profits. They are slowly restoring that server and then they have hours of restore from taped back up, ahead of them, all while you sit at your desk staring at a blank screen.
At eBoss recruitment software we know its your data and we take care of it. For a start, its unlikely that your server will ever go down. We use a cluster of servers, so if there is a problem with 1 server, it switches to another identical server. Also, we write your data to multiple disks at the same time. Is this the cloud? Well, its always been the cloud since the internet started. Is this the cloud as we know it recently? Yes, however its a Private cloud. Its our own dedicated hardware. The cloud you hear about today is a large public cloud and at this point, due to security concerns, we are reluctant to compromise your data on that. With our hosting partners we have built a private cloud. Using the same principles we offer a high availability cluster, in other words a system that is highly available.
Its good to know what’s going on in the background and at eBoss we spend a lot of time and energy into covering what could go wrong, so you don’t have to. And if you are still looking, don’t forget to ask your potential software supplier what they do in the background.
Comment made by Tim on Aug 7th 2010 at 8:10 pm:
GULP! Was this the right blog for a Saturday?
I went from calm and relaxed to stressed and worried and then reutrned to calm and collected when I realised I was with the Safe-Software-Provider
PHEW!