Anyone done this yet? How would your boss react?

[corydoras]

I suppose the way to get round it would be not to admit having anything that could receive them ,could the emp,oyer force you to buy a tablet or phone on the chance someone may email you on holiday?

They don't need to force you to buy one Chesters, they just give you a "work" phone or tablet.

[chesters1]

But you could refuse to take it ,you would pay tax on it so in essence your being forced to buy a bit of it ,strangely some foreign chap would steal it first day ,blooming foreigners

Edited August 15, 2014 by chesters1

[Steve Walker]

We do have a document which is informally and cheerfully known as the "Steve falls under a bus plan". There are several contractors we could fall back on as a last resort, but it would be very expensive. We also have a DR policy. We aren't actually as exposed as it looks, because the main live server is externally hosted, so hardware failures and operating system issues would be dealt with. They don't have the knowledge to fix or maintain the application software, though, which is all bespoke and written by me. And after all these years, fairly large and complex. That's really the factor which means I must be contactable, or we would need to get one of the contractors in. The source code is all cloud hosted separately and backed up in multiple locations. If we lost the datacentre providing our hosting, unlikely as that is, we would certainly get some disruption of service, with significant reputational damage, though I think we could get everything back up without too many contractual issues.

[Steve Walker]

I have been asking for a minion for ages, I should add!

[Rusty]

I guess a lot depends on the size of the company you work for, your role and what stage you’re at in your career, this sort of policy doesn’t work for every situation but I applaud the principle behind it. Why should anyone go on holiday for a couple of weeks knowing that they’ll come back to a full inbox? Holidays are supposed to be for getting away from it all, e-mail just defers the stress for a short time.

 

My employer's German parent company (RWE) is subject to strict employment legislation which is ‘policed’ by the Works Council. They comply with it religiously even to the extent of sending people home if they’ve worked too many hours. The UK part of the business isn’t governed by the same legislation but we are seeing some of the fallout. In the 36 years that I’ve worked for my employer I’ve never read the phrase “work/life balance” in any corporate publication but in recent months it’s appeared in a number of policies.

 

We’ve got a sweepstake going at work…the first with the balls to try it.

[kirisute]

oh it applies to me greatly!

I'm in a high school/ college! if systems are down for an hour there is uproar! in fact next week the electric is turned off all day Tuesday! Wednesday is gcse exam results!! this week we have created new virtual servers; off site copies of all relevant software and suchlike as well as ensuring full rdp support for all exam staff just in case things are not back running Wednesday morning!

48 hours without my partner and I? hell would break loose! lol

[chesters1]

No provision for a backup power supply ,i know the refrigeration plant uses a lot of power but theres some hefty generators out there

[corydoras]

oh it applies to me greatly!

I'm in a high school/ college! if systems are down for an hour there is uproar! in fact next week the electric is turned off all day Tuesday! Wednesday is gcse exam results!! this week we have created new virtual servers; off site copies of all relevant software and suchlike as well as ensuring full rdp support for all exam staff just in case things are not back running Wednesday morning!

48 hours without my partner and I? hell would break loose! lol

Maybe I didn't make myself clear. I meant some incident where for some reason NOBODY was allowed on the premises for 48 hrs.

 

We prepared for two scenarios.

 

You are barred entry to the building for 48 hrs. The data centre is working normally. We had another smaller trading room and a few offices about 5 miles away. Everyone who really had to could access the system from the other office.

 

OR

 

The same as above but the data centre is KO. The second office also had a "small" data centre. All mission critical apps were "shadowed" to the DR Data Centre, there was a maximum of twenty minutes between live and DR. We had a rake of kit in the DR data centre VAXs, HP-UX Mini Computers, all the usual Wintel stuff. Our LAN had 256 VLANs and each VLAN could have 64 nodes attached.

 

Not everyone needs hi-tech in DR. The back office only needed pens, pencils, paper, calculators and a fax machine.

[Andy_1984]

I suspect that this would not apply to Kiri, but I'll ask the rest of you one question. How would your company cop,e if due to some incident you were denied access to your premises and IT systems for forty-eight hours?

 

emails wouldn't get answered, properties wouldn't have been advertised, the printer server would go offline and stay offline(even though turning it off/on would fix it), they might not have had access to the file share meaning pretty much everything would grind to a halt.

 

by the time I eventually quit I had all that pretty much streamlined and idiot proof but I still to this day (4 years later) get the odd call to fix the file share not responding, and net going offline.

 

some dozy so n so thinks its alright to move the adsl router to a different wall socket not knowing that the one its meant to be in runs directly to the switchs ethernet IN, or "ooh whats this big thing in the loft with 2 miles of cat5 cables going in to it, I know lets turn it off"

[Steve Walker]

We looked into that kind of redundancy - the cost to risk ratio just didn't add up for the amount of money the clients are willing to pay for the service. We also felt that if our provider catastrophically lost a datacentre the chances of getting enough tech support from the provider to switch over was slim.