Recall the last time you planned a new walking route or considered using a new piece of gym equipment with clients. Did you carry out a risk assessment? Of course you did. You may not have written it down but you thought about it. What might happen, how likely it’d happen and what would be the consequences if it did. Then, for each risk, what you’d do to prevent it or minimise its effects. But, what about your business, when did you last carry out a risk assessment on that? In particular, regarding your use of technology. I’m guessing you have n’t. Have you?

I thought not. So it’s about time you did. And I regret that you’ll probably end up a bit scared and a little paranoid by the end of the process. But that’s a good thing, as you’re more likely to act on the results. I promise that will pay you back in the end. Getting started is easy. Write down a list of all the technology you use or own.

And here’s where it gets a little scary. Think about what might happen if each item was lost, stolen or died. You have to consider each scenario separately as the consequences or likelihood may be different. Let’s take a laptop as an example.

If it dies, it might be fixable, but in reality, the most common failure is the hard disk and that’s where everything that makes a laptop, your laptop, lives. Then there are viruses to contend with. So you need a backup strategy. Make regular copies of your important data to an external drive or memory stick. But what if that’s stolen along with the laptop. There are a number of solutions that will backup your data to the web. This is something we geeks call offsite backup and it’s great because it means that the copy is physically far away from the original. So, things happening locally, like fires, floods, plagues of children and other forces of nature won’t affect it. Its other big advantage is that you can access your data from anywhere with any computer. This is part of a trend where even the software lives on the web. It’s a fantastic way of dealing with a whole set of risks, but it does introduce a few new ones.

Can you still access your documents if your internet connection fails? Where’s the nearest alternative Wi-Fi hotspot? Is it open when you need it? Take the time to answer these questions now and you’ll not have to do it at 5am on your way to see that new celebrity client. Take my email for example.

I use a web based email client. I can send and receive from all my email addresses from one place that I can access from any web browser. Normally that’s my laptop or desktop PC using the home or office broadband. But any network will do, and I have a 3G dongle for when I’m away from the office. I can also use the browser on my iphone. On the one occasion the email client service failed for a couple of hours, I was able to use the webmail service of each individual email address. And I regularly use all these different methods just to make sure that they still work. Because that’s the big secret of backups.

You don’t want the first time you use them to be the first time you need them. Because I guarantee that’s when you’ll find out they’ve not been working the way you expected them to. But, back to your laptop.

What if it was lost or stolen? Have you bothered to setup a password or any disk encryption? Because now there’s a new risk. Someone accessing the data you stored on it. It’s bad enough if they can get hold of your personal information. But have you been storing all you clients’ details as well. What have you done to secure that? Not much. The Information Commissioner takes a dim view of such things and parliament has been steadily giving him much stronger teeth with which to express his displeasure. Go get a copy of the excellent TrueCrypt utility. But be warned if you forget the password, there is absolutely no way to get your data back, ever.

Now repeat the exercise for your phone, email, printer, website and all the other technology you rely on. And for those of you who smugly wrote down that your web designer looks after all the bad stuff that can happen to your website: What happens if your web designer dies, gets lost or stolen? See, I warned you that I’d make you a bit paranoid.