If you haven’t heard, Amazon.com’s popular website went down recently.

Not the website front page itself, but the infrastructure.

You see, companies like Foursquare, Reddit, Quora and many many other big name companies actually use Amazon to host their websites, their apps and their data. So when Amazon went down it was a really,really big deal because not only were many websites down but many websites actually lost users’ data. Amazon is the shining knight in terms of security and redundancy and even they hiccup’d, went down and lost vital digital information.

The reason I am bringing this up is that when you invest in applications on the web, its important to ask questions about the data…specifically your data. You should know for certain what happens in disaster situations like Amazon’s. If a meteorite comes from outer space and lands on the servers, is your data completely lost? If the server catches fire, is your information burning away with it? Sounds ridiculous right? Well Amazon has shown otherwise, and even then I’ll interject with a story…

A previous company I worked for had a client who had invested thousands and thousands of dollars in server infrastructure and everything was running great!  Well, disaster day came and the location caught fire and they lost all of their servers. They raised some money and re-invested the thousands and thousands of dollars and re-built their infrastructure and sure enough a very sad natural disaster hit and it was all lost again. These events were months apart.

Freakish and unfortunate events can occur and when they do, its important to know that your data is protected.

So with the above said, here are some questions that you should ask when working with a company that hosts your data:

Is my data backed up?

If my data is backed up, how often?

How is my data backed up? Is it onsite or at an offsite location? i.e. if the one site goes down, is there a second site where my data exists for redundancy?

Is my data backed up securely?

If a meteorite does come and land on your servers, what happens next?

Is my data sold? What is your policy?

These are just a few that are important, in our view.  And part of your job as a coach who chooses different technology solutions to house your data and help in your daily job as a college coach is to make sure that the solution you’ve chosen is top tier.

Technology has advanced at an amazing pace; however, we are far from being past asking these questions.