Tales from the Haunted Server Room

It was a dark and stormy night, as it sometimes is on Halloween. It’s a time when kids and adults alike enjoy dressing up as scary monsters and partaking in some good old-fashioned trick-or-treating. You’re pulling a late night at the office, and you hear a sound emanating from your server room; an unsavory clicking sound that echoes through the recesses of your office. What do you do?

Technology that makes strange, scary noises can have a real-life horror effect on its owner, who will be spending money out the wazoo to replace faulty technology when it fails. Here’s a situation that you might have run into once upon a time.

The Tell-tale Hardware Failure
You’re sitting at your desk diligently working well into the wee hours of the morning, when you hear the clicking noise. You gingerly get up, unsure of whether or not it’s for real or just your imagination. You hear it again, only this time it seems louder and slightly different. This time, it sounds as if there are metal parts grinding against each other. You rush down the hallway toward the sound. “Click. Click. Click. Griiiiiiiind.” It’s not just your imagination anymore. You burst into the server room, but amongst all of the blinking lights and hardware, you can’t tell where it’s coming from. You perk your ears and try to pick out the sound. It’s on the far end of the room, but you notice it too late. Your server has fallen victim to a hardware failure, and the data stored on it along with it.

A Cask of Downtime
Nothing is quite as terrifying as your entire IT infrastructure being lost to a hardware failure. It’s a horror story come to life. Your staff can no longer access the data stored on that server, and any applications located on it are but a distant memory. You’re now walled within a prison of downtime that’s not so easily escaped. You need to purchase new hardware that’s capable of restoring the server back to life (not using Voodoo), and you need to attempt to salvage any information you can from your old device. Migrating this information can be time-consuming, and you need to make sure that the applications you previously used on your old server will be compatible with your new one. Overall, it’s a crippling amount of time and money that can be better spent on other parts of your business.

Fall of the House of Horne & Benik
Edgar Allan Poe puns aside, chances are that if your business falls victim to a complete and total data disaster like the aforementioned scenario, and you’re unable to recover any of this information, your business will fail. Most organizations that can’t recover from a crippling disaster will go out of business within a year of the incident, so you need to take a proactive stance against these issues.

A business continuity plan, featuring comprehensive data backup, disaster recovery, and remote monitoring solutions is your best bet. Give Horne & Benik a call at (603) 499-4400 for more information about how your business can take advantage of best practices and technology solutions to maximize operational efficiency.

From all of us at Horne & Benik, stay safe this Halloween weekend, and be sure to enjoy a good scare or two.