It happened my first day. Literally, my first day at Backupify as the company’s new CFO. When starting a new role, you want to make a great impression and hit the ground running – and of course the last thing you expect is that due to, ahem, user error you’ll demolish a document that is intended for your investors. But that is how I started my tenure at Backupify.
I’ve spent my career in tech start-ups, but having been at the same company for the past six years, I was new to this whole cloud based email/document management phenomena. I had always used Outlook. I had always used on-prem backups. Restoring anything was reserved for catastrophes (fires, hurricanes, inter-galactic invasions), but not for document recovery. There were numerous times a financial model ended up being corrupted and I’d have to rebuild from scratch because there was just no point in trying to sort through a restore with IT. The restore would take at least a week and the document recovered was never quite what I remembered.
On my first day at Backupify, one of my new colleagues shared a document with me on Google Drive that was intended for our investors. There was one financial model in particular that caught my interest and I started to slice and dice it to better understand the numbers. Five minutes later, panic set in. It was in that one moment that I learned two very valuable lessons:
1) This data was live and I had just actively edited a document that was being sent out. There was no way for me to easily undo the total reorg I had done to this document.
2) This is why I work at Backupify. In a matter of minutes I had a colleague show me how to restore the document to the original version. The restore itself took seconds.
Real time document sharing and collaboration is fantastic. Teams can be much more efficient and communicate better. The downside is that “someone” can accidentally delete or edit a financial model that may have taken months to build. It’s every CFO’s nightmare.
I’m excited to work in a cloud-based environment and I feel much better now that I have the security of the restore and recover capabilities of Backupify (just in case I ever suffer from another deleting disaster).
