When budget restricts your technology spend, increase your budget!
When budget restricts your technology spend, increase your budget! Overview As trusted advisors and technologists, we use our experience and knowledge to provide guidance. Our clients, as business leaders and decision makers, evaluate and implement our recommendations. You likely have similar relationships, and understand that decisions aren’t always so easy. However, when risk mitigation is clouded by budgetary concerns, the negative outcome can often have a far greater financial impact on the business.
With about 100 employees, this bi-coastal firm develops and executes marketing and publicity strategies for high-profile clients across the country. Highly regarded throughout their industry, they’re different than most corporate organizations.
However, like many mid-size businesses, they too put an abundance of faith in their bottom line, ignoring the dangers and sometimes failing to see the destruction that spending too little on technology can cause. That came to an end late last month when after about 10 months of warnings, conversations and recommendations, their email server crashed causing severe database corruption and a total loss of email. The Impact and the Recovery It was Thursday at about 2:00 p.m. when the alerts came to our support desk, and their business came to a stop. For an organization rooted in communications, an email outage has a tremendous negative impact and essentially equates to a complete business shutdown. Over the next 72 hours our emergency response team worked around the clock, implementing a range of creative solutions to stabilize their system. Collaborating across the country, the team worked diligently to rebuild the systems. By Monday morning, the client’s business was operational, however the majority of the email was still gone.
For a week following the disaster, our team continued to work on the recovery, restoring most of the email thought to be lost. Unfortunately, we had to deliver news to some staff that after exhausting all options, their email was in-fact unrecoverable. While no one wants to hear (or deliver) this kind of news, the truth is the company was lucky. The failure should have been a total loss, but the skills and sophistication of our team allowed them to escape with minimal damage. However, what was an avoidable disaster became a major crisis costing tens of thousands of dollars in emergency recovery work, and tens of thousands more in lost revenue, lost productivity, and possible damage to their reputation and brand. Business Summary. For budgetary reasons, our client elected to postpone implementation of a critical system. They identified the upgrade as “an insurance policy”, but since a crash was “unlikely” and “had never happened before” they held-off implementation. The gamble failed.
We can all agree that cost is typically what causes delay, and we can all understand why. But when liability, risk, and the health of your business are on the line, it’s critical you heed the advice of your trusted partner. Think about the following scenarios:
- 1) Your insurance carrier recommends increasing coverage to reduce your liability and protect your business. Do you increase the value of the policy?
- 2) Your corporate attorney recommends further review of a complex contract with potential business implications. Do you take the advice of council?
- 3) Your maintenance manager says the lock on your front door is broken. Do you make the necessary repairs?
In any of these situations, what company wouldn’t find the money to make the correction? Why do decision makers continue to cut spending from their critical IT budgets, often jeopardizing their organization? Conclusion At Mindcore we pride ourselves on our trusted, consultative approach to business technology. We believe our clients will follow our guidance when it comes to the best interest of their IT. Unfortunately, they don’t always, and as businesspeople, we can all relate to that in some way.
Organizational leaders must take a serious look at their technology budget and ask themselves the hard questions: Am I listing to my technology advisor? What are the real implications of a system failure or cyber attack? How good is my team at responding to a crisis, and do I want to be responsible for finding out?
At the end of the day, your technology provider should be able to speak at a high-level about your IT concerns and put a strategic plan together to correct vulnerabilities. If you’ve already had these discussions, we’d love to hear your comments on how the conversation went. If you’d like a consultation, give us a call.
Learn More About Matt
Matt Rosenthal is CEO and President of Mindcore, a full-service tech firm. He is a leader in the field of cyber security, designing and implementing highly secure systems to protect clients from cyber threats and data breaches. He is an expert in cloud solutions, helping businesses to scale and improve efficiency.
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