Internet Based Home Business and Contingency Plans

You have built a successful Internet based home business and your revenues are rolling in, so why should you worry about contingency plans? After all the Internet is ubiquitous and available virtually all over the world. We will examine some of the single points of failure, which could seriously damage your revenue stream in this article about contingency plans.

There are literally thousands if not millions of Internet businesses today and we cannot anticipate every possible scenario. Instead this article will discuss some of the general areas that anyone who depends on the Internet for their revenue should consider. Single points of failure are really the central focus of any contingency planning. Any time you have a failure of one of these elements, you can seriously risk your revenue stream and service to your customers.

The Internet itself is widely available with many interconnecting routes for managing traffic and as a result is one of the most robust networks available on the planet. So what is the problem? Well everyone must access the Internet from some point regardless of whether you do it from your home or office. In addition the services you use to provide your service to your customers must also access the Internet as well. These access points and applications, which run on these servers are often the trouble spots for many people.

Lets assume that you have a high speed line coming into your home with several computers and employees working on them and using this high speed line. What happens if you have computer failures, your hard disk fails or your high speed line goes down for a day. Do you have back up plans in place to replace your computers, to work from another location or recover your lost data. Depending on the risk of these events occurring and the impact on your revenue, you may want to implement recovery programs that minimize the impact of these sorts of failures.

At the other end of the network you are most likely making use of some ones server farm and applications that are running on these servers. This area is even more important since if your revenue stream is dependent on these applications running you will want to make sure that they can survive any number of catastrophes. Questions you can ask include: is the data backed up every day; do they have back up servers that your applications can be migrated to if there is a failure; do they have back up power to deal with power failures; do they have several access points to the internet in case one line goes down; are their databases secure from hackers; etc.

These are just a few of the areas that should be considered as part of your contingency planning activity. Of course you must balance cost vs. revenue loss with the risk of failures to decide on how much should be spent to deal with a potential disruption to your Internet based home business.