Let’s imagine for a moment that you played cricket for your country. Consider the fact that you might have spent your entire youth playing at the top level, and now you are the captain or the vice-captain of the nation’s team. Then think about how you would react if you were found out to have been involved in cheating. You might end up crying live on television.
In case you missed it, twice in a week Australian cricketers have broken down in tears in front of the world’s media after a “ball tampering” scandal. They are now banned from playing for the country for a year. So what do they do? They may have something else to fall back on, but it looks difficult for them because they have invested everything into playing cricket. They have put all their eggs in one basket and now that has been taken away from them.
I doubt you have much sympathy for these big cry-babies. However, today there will be business people crying because they have also lost their livelihood. You will probably have more sympathy for them. They will have discovered that their data has disappeared, or that their computers have been stolen. Every year on 31st March we are reminded of this issue because this day is “World Backup Day“. It is designed to tell us all to backup. All well and good, you might say. After all, I am sure you are not one of the 30% of business who never backup their data.
However, even if you are perfect and backup your data there is a potential problem. Many people who suffer a data loss and head off to their backup files to restore old information discover that the backup files are missing vital data, or worse still, just do not work. Almost no-one who stores backups attempts to restore date from those files, so they have no way of testing their integrity. These businesses have put all their eggs in one basket, assuming that one set of backups is enough as “we’ll never need them anyway”. Those business people end up crying like an Australian cricketer as they realise they have nowhere to go.
I hear you saying, though, that it will never happen to your business because you use “the cloud”. Aha, that’s OK then. Apart from when that one cloud company you use goes bust or has security breaches or systems failures, thereby removing your ability to restore your backed-up data. Having a single cloud service is eggs in one basket territory.
But it is not just in the world of backup that this is an issue. The whole world of online marketing is a real issue for businesses too. The trend for businesses to do almost all of their marketing online is growing. Indeed, for many companies, online marketing is all they do. Just a week after the Facebook scandal revealed a massive issue with data protection for businesses, companies that relied on this network for their marketing are having to re-evaluate what they do rapidly. Many companies have their promotion in the single basket of social media. Bad move.
I am reminded of this report on lead generation for business. It shows that the most successful method of generating leads is – wait for it – real-world, face-to-face, live meetings. Meanwhile, of course, marketing gurus point you towards the massive use of online video suggesting that you should concentrate on this kind of activity. The problem is that is “eggs in one basket” territory. In fact, this study reveals that video is one of the worst methods of generating leads for your business. (You might want to read what I said about the time-wasting impact of online video which I wrote over a year ago.)The real problem for many businesses is that they exist in a world of “eggs in one basket”. They have just one method of backup (which they never check). They use only one cloud service (which could fail). They use online marketing heavily (instead of a mix of methods). They rely on the Internet (when the real world is more useful). Of course, you never put all your eggs in a single basket, do you? If you did, you’d be just like an Australian cricketer and you wouldn’t want that, would you? Unless you like crying on television.
