Technology can be scary, especially new technology that you haven't used or experienced before. That's why, when making a major move for your business you should be confident, that when something goes wrong, you have a Plan B. Usually, having a Plan B requires a lot of work for businesses, as most software companies focus on the reliability of the live platform and don't typically have a disaster recovery system that their customers can use, although they may have an internal plan to get everything running again — we have one of these, and an untold amount of redundancy, to prevent the worst happening, but the simple fact is, even multi-billion-dollar companies cannot be immune from downtime at one point.

A Plan B for when your key business systems go down is important, you need to ask yourself, what will you do if:

• You have existing orders to fulfil, how will you access them if you can't access your system?

• You need to continue to add orders to your system during the time

• You can't access your normal till functions

• It's your peak, and you need to focus on getting orders fulfilled

With Digital Florists, we've thought about all of these scenarios and have many redundancies in place, in case there are any technical issues. Including:

• Automatically send a printable PDF of an order via email every time it is created. You can send this to a special folder with a email rule, and forget about it until you may need it.

• Depending on the outage; adding orders may not be possible through the system. In this case, we have a printable order form within our documentation, to make sure you capture all information you need if you need to revert to a pen & paper workflow or use a Spreadsheet, which can be imported into the system as soon as the fault is resolved.

• A dedicated disaster recovery page, which contains a way to print all labels, order worksheets, order sheets and delivery routes in the event of technical difficulties.

Even if you aren't using Digital Florists, you can use the above to think about what you will do if something goes wrong, so that if it ever happens at an inconvenient time, you can think rationally and immediately move to another way of working temporarily, to ensure that the downtime doesn't become a headache for any longer than it should be. You should also reach out to your software providers, that you rely on and ask them what will happen if the system goes down, so that you have the assurance if there's a problem, you know what to do, and what not to do.