Is Your Internet Disaster Plan in Place?

[Commentary] On Dec 22, both Skype and Twitter were down for periods of time. The incidents may be unrelated, but they highlight our growing reliance on web communication tools to keep in touch.

As we move our exchanges to the cloud, we are increasingly vulnerable to these kinds of outages. The lesson here isn't that we should abandon online communications tools. Those are here to stay. We need to just keep our options open and be prepared to roll with the punches. Outages are going to be with us for many years to come, especially as these services scale up. The key thing is to have multiple channels ready if and when the next Skypefail or Twitter outage occurs. Think of it like an emergency back-up plan, much like families have rally points to meet up in case of disaster. For example: Meet on Twitter if Gmail fails. It may sound extreme, but with more and more companies and start-ups relying on these tools, it doesn't hurt to prepare for the worst.