Stories.

A small company hires a contractor. He builds the website, sets up the email, handles the day-to-day. After a few months the relationship sours and they part ways. Everything seems fine.

Two months later the website goes down. Email stops. They try to log into the domain registrar and the account isn't where they thought it was. The domain had been quietly moved to a private registration at an overseas registrar.

The old contractor says he doesn't know anything about it. But maybe he can look into it. For $250,000.

The company's only recourse was ICANN and the courts. It took months. No website and no company email the whole time.

A company's only IT employee gives two weeks' notice. Management figures it's no big deal, they'll hire a replacement. The IT person leaves. The replacement starts.

Day one, the new hire asks where the admin credentials are. Nobody knows. There's no documentation. Every password lived in the previous person's head, or on a personal device that left with them.

They can't get into the firewall. They can't manage the email system. They can't update the accounting software. They can't even log into the Wi-Fi router in their own office. Every vendor says the same thing: we only ever dealt with your IT guy, we don't have your details on file.

A smooth handover became weeks of recovery and thousands in emergency consulting.

For three years the IT manager assured leadership that everything was backed up nightly. It was in the monthly report. It was a line in the budget. When the server failed, everyone expected a quick recovery.

The backups hadn't run in over a year. The backup software had thrown an error 14 months earlier and stopped. Nobody noticed, because nobody but the IT manager had access to the backup system. And he never checked.

Years of project files, financial records and client data. Some of it came back from laptops and email attachments. Most of it was gone.