Businesses Accept Technical Risks Without Knowing It.. Stringfellow Can Help.
There are various ways you can address risks in a business environment. A quick web search will show the same iteration of four options: accept, avoid, reduce, and transfer. Technology risks in a business should be clearly understood due to their impact across all business operations. That $500 switch in the closet becomes a real productivity killer when there isn’t a spare to replace it and the entire admin staff is down. Unfortunately, most businesses accept large amounts of technology risk without knowing it.
A technology partner should allow you to transfer much technology risk from your business to theirs. The remaining risks should be clearly identified and then either reduced or avoided. A good partner will have pre-defined strategies to address 90% of the technical risks in most businesses. The remaining 10% needs to be classified and discussed.
Accepting technical risks in a business should be done only when other options are not viable. The root of the issue is often lack of budget to address the risk or the fact that “it hasn’t happened yet”. A good example of this is deferring hardware upgrades and “accepting” that when the machine fails, there will be downtime for the user. Murphy’s law is that not only will the machine fail at the worst possible time, it will also cost more in lost productivity than the cost of a proactive hardware replacement.
Data loss is especially unforgiving in this way, as over half of businesses fail within two years following a major data loss event. No business would accept this risk, but that is often what they are unknowingly doing by not having a good technology partner in place. Good data backup and recovery solutions are often a product of experiences over time that an individual business does not have the luxury of going through.
Written by: Edward Stringfellow