Forbes has posted an interesting commentary piece on the critical need small businesses have of cost-effective disaster preparedness solutions. Because small businesses cannot diversify their risks, they are more vulnerable to disasters than big businesses and have fewer resources from which to rebuild. In the first edition of Prepare for the Worst, Plan for the Best: Disaster Preparedness and Recovery for Small Businesses, Stefan wrote that while network failures are relatively rare, the network is a good first test of how far contingency planning has progressed. He added, “When someone tells you that their network is completely protected and fail-safe, tell them that you would come over to their office and ‘pull the plug’ on any one network cable. Observe their response!” So I really enjoyed Forbes’ account of one small businessperson who, in a live test for his management, unplugged a file server and then walked over to his desk to manually trigger a failover to the remote copy. That’s confidence! Check out the article. It is a good read.