Today we have a guest editorial from Grant Fritchey as Steve is on holiday. This editorial was originally published on 24 Oct 2016.

You plan and plan in preparation for the zombiepocalypse. You lay in weapons. You get food and water supplies built up. You take training in survival skills, martial arts, sword & firearms. You build a fence on the property and put in an alarm system along with your generator and a well. You are ready for the zombies to arrive. Heck, you’re kind of bored waiting for the zombies to arrive. What do you get? Clowns.

Clowns?

Clowns.

Here’s the good news, all that preparation, funny enough, still applies to clowns. You’re still ready for a siege, but instead of shambling, rotting corpses, it’s a horde of clowns, all coming out of a single car. The training, the supplies, the weapons, they’re all still going to be useful.

What happened to the Data Platform you ask? Here’s the thing, you don’t know what your disaster will actually be. Yeah, you might have severe database corruption caused by extra-solar radiation (same stuff you thought would cause the zombies) affecting your disks. All the backups and practice restores in preparation for that corruption will serve you well when it happens. What if it doesn’t. What if someone just turns off the SAN? Did all that preparation go to waste? Not at all. You’re still prepared.

Whether it’s a flood from a hurricane, or a flood from bad maintenance in the bathroom of the floor above your server room, the preparations you’ve made are still useful. Yes, we’re all very disappointed that it’s a clownpocalypse instead of a zombiepocalypse. The good news is, regardless of the source of the trouble, the preparations made for it are still going to be useful. Same thing goes for all the work you do in setting up a proper disaster recovery processing for the data you manage.

No clowns were harmed during the composing of this bit of whimsy. The same can’t be said of zombies.