A friend of mine travels a lot for work. This has him spending an unreasonable amount of time in hotels and Airbnbs.
The first thing he does after checking in to his hotel room, even before figuring out which of the 20 light switches turns off the bedside lamp, is find out where the fire exits are. When staying in Airbnbs, he asks the host beforehand about escape routes and has been known to cancel if things look dodgy on arrival.
You might think he’s paranoid but, several years ago, he found himself climbing out of a window and down the fire brigade’s turntable ladder when the lower floors and only escape route of a building he was staying in were engulfed by flames.
When choosing software (or hotels) most of us don’t check the fire exits. But we absolutely should.
I keep getting reminded of this story when talking to organisations thinking of migrating off a platform and discovering the door with the fire exit sign is in fact a storage cupboard.
Most recently again this week: a platform offering a “scheduled backup” that saves the data on the same server as the production data, in a limited format that contains the records but none of the relationships between them. And point-in-time recovery? Don’t be silly.
It’s an easy can to kick down the road when you’re excited about using a new platform. But, please check the fire exits first, it’s a lot cheaper than discovering you can’t reach them when the building’s already burning.
Colin