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Generators keep the lights on. They do not keep the business running if the systems it depends on are sitting in a server room with no power.
When the power goes, three things happen to a business that runs its systems on-site: the server goes down, the internet connection goes down, and the staff who could work from their phones cannot, because the system they need is the server that is down.
The usual answer is a bigger UPS or a generator for the server room. That keeps the server alive, but it does not restore the fibre, the router or the branch forty kilometres away that was also in stage four.
A system running on Microsoft Azure does not notice that your office has lost power. It is in a data centre with redundant supply, and it is reachable from any phone with a signal. The question becomes how your people reach it — and a mobile data connection is a great deal cheaper to keep alive than a server room.
For most of the businesses we work with, moving the core system to the cloud turned load-shedding from a stop-work event into an inconvenience. The office goes dark; the quotes, the orders and the schedule carry on from a laptop on a battery and a phone on LTE.
The office is only half the problem. A driver, an inspector or a technician in the field is often somewhere with no signal regardless of the grid. A mobile app that has to be online to work stops the moment they walk into a basement.
Offline-first design — capture on the device, sync when there is signal — covers both load-shedding and the ordinary realities of South African connectivity. It is a business decision made at the scoping stage, not a feature bolted on later, and it is the reason several of the field systems we built keep working on days the grid does not.
In practice
Sonke’s field app was designed for no signal at all: it captures offline and syncs when it can.
Non-profit — gender-based violence and HIV prevention
Monitoring and evaluation across Africa
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The spreadsheet is not the problem. The problem is the moment it becomes the only person in the business who knows what is going on.
