What would happen if your web developer disappeared?

A cautionary tale of two sides

We were contacted by two businesses in December that were similar in many ways, but fundamentally in far different situations.

Both businesses have a complex custom-built CRM, and the operation of both companies is dependent on their system running smoothly, and therefore uptime is absolutely crucial. Both systems were developed over time, with a lot of investment, and are huge. Most importantly, both were managed by a single developer.

Unfortunately, this is where the similarities end.

The first company, have a custom-built PHP Laravel-based CRM. They were concerned about their business reliance, specifically what would happen if their web developer disappeared overnight. They wanted to ensure that they have a larger and more-established development team in place that could seamlessly take over in the event of an emergency, and could work along-side their current developer in the meantime. It is absolutely imperative that their system stays online as their business depends on it for their day-to-day tasks.

This, of course, was not an issue for us, and this week they have instructed us to get started. It will take a few days of work to get up to speed, review everything, and give them peace of mind.

The second company are different. They have a CRM that is equally critical to their business, and much larger. This is built in an old .NET framework. Unfortunately, their web developer recently passed away, with all of the files on an encrypted drive, and therefore unavailable. To make the matter worse, with .NET projects the source code is compiled, so it can be run as it is, but (mostly) not editable. The website is also hosted in the web developer’s account, is out of date, and has a large number of modifications that were paid for, coded, but never made live.

We have started to reverse-engineer the compiled code, and we’re confident that we can get at least the core functionality working. The issue is that it will not be cheap, will not be quick, and due to the unknowns, we will not know what is possible and what isn’t until we get there. So, the client could potentially be facing a bill of many weeks of work, and a long delay, whilst in the meantime they are vulnerable to the CRM going offline.

It is worthwhile in them investing in, and restoring the system, as a full redevelopment could potentially cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. However, that is easy for us to say as we are not paying the bill! Besides, recently the client has invested heavily in another venture so may not have the cashflow. Their only interim solution is to subscribe to a (far more basic) off-the-shelf system to do the bare minimum which, even if it works, would be a massive compromise. Until this is setup, they risk their whole platform going offline which would be catastrophic to their business. Unfortunately, they are in a situation where they can’t win.

Their current situation is what the first company have planned to avoid.

In hindsight of course they should have made business resilience plans, but in reality, they are far from alone and their situation is common-place.

We worked for a very large organisation that you’ve likely heard of. They failed to have safe guards in place for their domain name, and the responsibility for its renewal was not allocated to anyone specific, so when their debit card expired, their systems went down. This included their public-facing website, their whole internal CRM, and all of their emails. Luckily our monitoring systems alerted us just before midnight on a Friday. We had their login, so went in and paid the nominal fee on their behalf using our debit card. If we didn’t have the systems in place, they would have opened the office on Monday morning, and had complete system failure. A simple domain name renewal can severely impact a business; the domain name is the key to the kingdom.

So, have a think, what would happen if your web developer disappeared? What would happen to your CRM, website, domain name, emails? Could your business function?

If you’re worried, and want advice on anything web-related, or a backup web agency, please get in touch.

Of course, your website is a small part of your business, so if you have any wider concerns about business continuity or crisis management, then we’d recommend Su, a lovely lady from SDH Crisis Management.

We are Webbed Feet, were here to help you prepare for the unexpected.