THE SECRET TO PREVENTING BUSINESS DESTROYING DOWNTIME
A few weeks ago, I heard about someone who had their Google account getting frozen.
Turns out he let his Google drive account exceed his storage limit.
And instead of just paying the $2 a month to upgrade his storage, he kept putting it off.
Which meant “bye-bye” to his email...
As well as access to other important information he needed for things like paying bills, password resets, and his favorite email newsletters.
So, he was asked why he hadn’t upgraded it sooner.
I knew it wasn’t because of the money because it was just a few bucks.
And the bottom line was this…
He said it simply wasn’t a priority at that moment in time.
It was so far down his ‘to-do list’, that the only way this was going to become a priority for him was if Google switched off his account.
Which is exactly what they did a few weeks later.
But by then it was too late because he’d lost some important emails while his account was blocked.
And in fairness to Google, they’d been sending him notifications for at least a month before they cut him off.
But he just ignored them.
Why am I telling you this?
Because I see the exact same thing happening with many small business owners.
You might think ignoring things like systems notifications, or software updates won’t cause any problems.
And I totally get that.
You’re busy and you’ve got a ton of other urgent priorities that need dealing with.
But the reality of not maintaining things like system updates can lead to catastrophic consequences for businesses.
Like stolen proprietary data, or viruses that completely block your systems and lead to downtime or a hardware failure.
But here’s the good news…
You don’t need to worry about your IT systems and security.
There’s a much better way to make sure all your IT needs are taken care of.
You can enlist the help of a dedicated team of experts that remove any guesswork when it comes to keeping your systems up to date and secure.
So, if you’re ready to eliminate any security risks and avoid business disruption, then it’s time to speak with an ITSM and IT Policy expert that can do all this magic stuff without you having to lift a finger. Someone who can broker for the right MSP with the technical and industry expertise for your IT and security needs.
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Be on the lookout in a couple of days for another post related to IT Woes. In the meantime, I would love to hear your stories, thoughts, and opinions about IT Woes here. I have been known to gift Hive tokens to my favorite comments.
P.S. If you didn’t get a chance to read my recent eBook ‘You’re Not Immune to IT Woes: Don’t Ignore the Symptoms’, here’s the link. There’s loads more great advice in here about what you need to protect your business.
My story is more crazy than someone forgetting to pay the bill. It's some years old, but still relevant - it was an eye-opener for me.
I was a "devops" guy at my previous workplace, hired as a developer but eventually ending up doing quite a lot of systems administration. We decided that maintaining a working email server and keeping the spam out was difficult and not a part of our core business, so it was eventually outsourced to Google.
I suppose its a well-known problem among system administrators - there are lots of cronjobs running, some of them as frequently as every minute, and error messages are sent by email by default. Fixing those errors are rarely a priority. With gmail it was also very easy to set up filters to just ignore those emails.
The account had a quota for the amount of gigabytes one could store, but it did not have any quota of the number of emails (I'm such an old-fashioned guy that I still think attachments and HTML mail is evil. With only proper emails in the email folder, some few gigabytes should be sufficient to hold almost a million of emails), but apparently (at least then) there were some hidden limit - after exceeding some hundred thousands emails, things just stopped working.
I did have some few days of intermittent errors and slowness before my account was simply disabled.
People sending me emails would get an error in return that the account had been "deactivated" (an indication that I had been sacked). I would not have access to my email archive. We had also started using the office suite of Google, I no longer could log in and didn't have access neither to my own files nor shared files. Also, I'm a frequent user of "forgot my password"-links, when the email stops working one often finds oneself locked out.
This was a paid account and of course we were complaining to customer support ... but this is Google, they don't really have a customer support. All we got was polite answers from the first line containing phrases like "our engineers are working on the case". I don't know, we probably had a 98% SLA, and Google considered that if 98% of our email accounts were working, everything was fine.
We had to create an account "tobias2" for me. No way Google support could help forwarding emails sent to tobias to the new tobias2-account. Being a system administrator and informing contacts that "... sorry, [email protected] doesn't work anymore, you have to send emails to [email protected]" ... that's just extremely embarrassing. This wasn't the primary reason why I quit that job, but it possibly did play a part. Half a year later (and one week before my termination date), my account was back up and working.
That is a real crazy story. I am assuming this was before G-Suite?
I quit in 2012 ... or was it 2011? Something like that :-)
Pre G-suite and Workspace days. Makes sense.
This seems to be crazy and I am sure there is a significant dependence of many citizens on this service of google. In the era of technology we all face some such instances some times. I am sure in the coming days, need for ITSM would increase dramatically
In this case, in a business setting, proper Event Management should have prevented this from happening if good ITSM processes were in place.