No matter how fantastically advanced technology gets it is still susceptible to the most basic of human interventions.
We use HQ for Accountants [HQ4A] to manage our CRM requirements. It stores all of the contact information for our clients, maintains client histories that track all messages [email, fax, SMS message or letter], tracks our jobs workflow [accounts, payroll, tax, bookkeeping, enquiries], stores our shared calendars and to do lists. It works just great and is accessible from any location via a web-browser. Unless the server is down.
When I tried to login today from home I got no response. Now the server doesn't expect a day off for the bank holiday, so I was expecting it to welcome me in as usual - but it was not listening. After going through a couple of simple diagnostic routines I rapidly came to the conclusion that there was probably nothing at all wrong with HQ4A but there was something very wrong with the server - it was switched off.
One of my colleagues, who lives much closer to the office than myself, was happy to drive over and see what was going on. It turned out that the cleaners had been in today and someone had unplugged the server to use a vacuum cleaner! So, the RAID mirrored drives, Windows Server 2003 operating system and network firewall were powerless, despite all of their technological wizardry, against a simple, unintentional human intervention.
Of course, this is a problem that could have easily been avoided by better communication with the cleaning team or something as simple as a sticker on a socket saying "please don't turn me off" but the real point is that it is a problem that can so easily occur in the real, not technological, world. The potential for a malicious or criminal intervention is much more worrying.
Anyway, all is now well and more importantly, soon this can never be an issue again. When HQ for Accountants is next upgraded, in a couple of weeks, we are having it hosted on a third party server in a secure data centre, rather than on a server in our own office. I am positive that the managers of the data centre will have a bit more control over who is wandering in and out and what they are up to.
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