Tomorrow our company is hosting its a virtual tech summit. We had never planned for it to be virtual. In fact, it was SUPPOSED TO be our first big event in the Raleigh, NC area. Coronavirus didn’t get the memo. In 24 hours, we flipped the event to virtual and were ready to roll.
But while I’m sure it will look super smooth and easy and totally natural and like this has just been the way we’ve lived forever, it’s going to be an example of business continuity in action. And every single attendee will be his or her own example of business continuity in action.
As it stands right now, we will have speakers participating live from all over the country. That means wrangling time zones and schedules and kids and pets and home phones that won’t stop ringing because contractors are “busy replacing windows in your area” and they’d love to stop by and give you a free estimate.
And that’s just par for the course right now. But people are also sick. So while the plan is for all of us to jump on live streams and present our content tomorrow and handle live Q&A, maybe that won’t work out quite so well. What if I get sick?
I also live deep in the country, where Internet speeds haven’t really progressed since 1999. When the systems are operating at their best, we can see almost 10Mb down and 2Mb up. But because everyone is at home and the backbones are shared with mobile providers, today’s service is less than optimal.
Teams does great in most situations, but with the kids streaming media in the other room, it gets choppy.
Long-time readers (ha!) will know that I firmly believe in using technology to solve its own problems, so yesterday I used one of my practice sessions to test a 2nd level of business continuity. I created a Teams meeting of 1 (hello me!) when the kids were napping, added my presentation, and hit ‘record.’ When I was done, I just ended the meeting and let the rest of the magic happen on my behalf.
Because Microsoft Teams automatically saves all recordings to Stream from the cloud side, I didn’t have to continue to tax my paltry Internet service. I didn’t have to tell the kids they couldn’t watch their favorite shows – I have to stave off the revolt as long as possible.
A little later I created a new Teams meeting with a teammate, shared my Stream tab to the meeting with system audio, and voila: it was like I was live-presenting my content!
So now I have a legitimate business continuity plan for my BC plan. Because if there is anything I’ve learned in 23 years of infrastructure management, it’s that your first DR plan will not work. You have to have backups for your backups.
Hope to see you tomorrow, either live or pre-recorded! And if I do have to get a moderator to stream my pre-recorded content, I will still be online to handle Q&A through chat.
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