Can Internet Mishaps Affect Your Home Business?
Most of you probably heard about the Internet cables in the Mediterranean north of Egypt that were cut recently, disrupting service in that area and others further east. At first there were two and today a third became known according to an article at BBC News, New cable cut compounds tech woes.
Wednesday’s (Jan.31, 2–8) incident caused disruption to 70% of the nationwide internet network in Egypt on Wednesday, while India suffered up to 60% disruption.
What if this happened in your area? Maybe your were affected by this incident?
- Are you prepared with back-up of your records and inventories?
- Can you contact your customers without the use of the computer?
- Do you have the ability to keep in touch with your customers/clients by phone?
- Is any part of your production powered by the Internet?
- Can you do ordering, filling orders, banking if the Internet goes down?
Think about what you would do if you didn’t have Internet access and share your plan with us.
If you were affected by this latest crisis, we’d like to know how you’re coping.
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Natural Disasters Disrupting Home Businesses
(c)2008 Mary Emma Allen
Tags: Egypt, home-business, Internet, internet cables, MediterranneanShare This
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POSTED IN: Technology
6 opinions for Can Internet Mishaps Affect Your Home Business?
Ben Helps | SBJ
Feb 3, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Tricky one, and it depends entirely on where the internet is down. I’ve resisted moving to Google Docs, Google Cal, etc as I just don’t trust having internet whenever and wherever I need it (at a reasonable price), and all of my business related internet access is to within my country (Australia).
So if we lost the pipes to say, America, it wouldn’t hurt that much (except waiting to get my gmail and torrents :P ).
On the other hand if something went wrong within Australia… our mobile pet supplies van requires a VPN connection to home base in order to process transactions - shop stock is largely without prices, as we rely on the computer for that.
The online version of our shop is hosted within Australia (targeting only the Australian market), so I imagine internet issues would affect certain portions of our audience.
And my freelance IT work - well, I could imagine that being the most affected of all.
Mary Emma Allen
Feb 3, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Thanks for visiting Home Biz Notes, Ben, and sharing your thoughts. Isn’t it amazing how our businesses depend on the Internet and computers so much nowadays, even within our own countries. Then if we’re trying to do business globally, we might be affected even more.
Ben Helps | SBJ
Feb 3, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Indeed. It’s sad, but I think what I miss most when there’s an outage that cut America off from the world, is Google :P
Kelly
Feb 4, 2008 at 8:11 am
Since many of our clients are abroad and rely on email for communication, we go nuts when there’s even a 5 minute outage.
Post-Katrina, we have definitely thought about how to make changes to make us not so dependent on the internet but the world is just so internet-focused. Even when you use the phone to check on bills, etc., you’re still subject to the internet dependency of other businesses.
Mary Emma Allen
Feb 4, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Thanks for the input, Kelly. It seems that in today’s world we simply can’t get away from the Internet. It’s interesting, as you say, even if we try to use other methods for communication, we discover that so many others we deal with are Internet dependent.
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Feb 9, 2008 at 6:35 am
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