I was fortunate to be born in a time when computing and gaming were on the upswing. I grew up with a few different personal computers at home such as the Commodore 64, Amiga500 and later on an IBM PC. Even though I had no real work to do and mostly played games, from the age of about 8 I had already understood that I didn’t like starting over from the beginning all the time. When you have to re-do the same things again not only is it boring but it’s a waste of time. In the business world one cannot expect all work to be interesting or enjoyable, but it should definitely not be a waste of time, as a waste of time is a waste of money.
In order to achieve maximum progress in a short time, you have to mitigate problems and avoid pitfalls. Since work can only be completed at a given rate (give or take) what is important is how much of that work you can hold on to. Many of the early videogames had limited systems for saving progress if they had any at all, which is similar to the weekly tape backups. A lot of time, work and patience can be lost from a single event sending you back to the beginning.
Over time as games developed they began to respect your time more and more. A continue option was standard, then the ability to save progress whenever you wanted and to keep all old saves, and many modern games save continuously with no demand on the player. Thankfully the business world of IT has kept pace and all of these ideas are implemented in sophisticated backup solutions. Using cloud storage is the first key part, SharePoint for example will keep numerous old versions of files, is inherently secure and resilient due to the nature of cloud storage. Products for business continuity like those from Octagon Technology take a whole image of your local PC/server and can be redeployed quickly onto new machines, or simply emulated online in the cloud. Even Microsoft Word in Office 365 will save every single keypress and action you take, allowing you maximum flexibility to undo mistakes while keeping all the desired work. This all helps to ensure that YOU don’t lose your work, but unfortunately other people exist, and some of those people would happily ransom your business back to you after taking your critical data hostage. At each stage, you need to stay secure or a good backup would be pointless. Losing control of data is also potentially an issue for GDPR compliance, and even though GDPR hasn’t been in the forefront of people’s minds lately, it certainly hasn’t gone away.
Remember: Backup – Secure – Control, achieve this and you might not have to restart your business game from level 1
If you need any more details about anything discussed in this article then do let me know. I will be happy to answer all your questions.
Ben
