This morning, the editors at ZDNet posed a question for our blogging crew for Halloween:
“What IT product/service/development this year gave you the chills?”
Over a cup of really strong Puerto Rican coffee, sitting here in my timeshare in Humacao and staring out into the Caribbean, I pondered the possibilities. The tempting and obvious dig and easy way to get blog hits would be to take the usual stab at Vista with a wooden stake, shoot silver bullets at other proprietary and DRM-practicing witches such as Apple or Amazon, or wave fiery torches at Google in order to drive the monsters back. But that would be too easy, and frankly, I don’t think any of the usual suspects merit a scary enough rating — they don’t even rank up there with Plan 9 From Outer Space as far as I am concerned.
What’s really scary is the type of thing that nails you due to your own inability or willingness to act, not by the actions of another vendor or the behavior of a particular product. I’m talking about neglecting your Business Continuity and Resiliency, be it on a personal or an enterprise level. And while these monsters are extremely easy to defeat, if you don’t make the adequate preparations beforehand, they will strike you dead. You can lose valuable data, lose customer confidence, as well as lots of money. Now THAT is truly scary.