Blog
Tags:
More and more disruptions are also threatening your business continuity
An increasing number of disruptions that last longer and are more disruptive threaten the continuity of applications and infrastructures. Failures of critical applications and systems are causing businesses, payments, hospitals and even worldwide air traffic to grind to a halt. Please don’t think “that won’t happen to us”.
Your dependency on digital systems is growing. And your critical systems are being delivered by a quickly decreasing list of suppliers. This is making your organization more vulnerable: those suppliers are ‘dropping the ball’ more and more often causing your business - or parts of your business - to come to a standstill. Hours on end or even for days. Due to the decreasing number of suppliers, we are not only seeing more disruptions, the disruptions have a bigger impact.
The examples are still fresh in our minds:
- The CrowdStrike update: this update disabled 8.500.000 Windows 10 machines. Often for days. The cause? Vulnerabilities in Windows itself that Microsoft has chosen not to fix for the past 15 years. And MS isn’t planning on fixing it at all.
- Loss of connectivity to Azure: a disruption that lasted for hours, because Microsoft concocted an anti DDOS cure that proved worse than the disease – users were handed problems instead of a solution.
- Google Password Manager disruption: People were denied access to their passwords for hours - so they couldn't log in anywhere and couldn't work at all - caused by an update that wasn't tested properly.
These are just a few examples that demonstrate where depending on the big boys caused major issues for businesses. If you haven't been hit by these events, there's a big chance some other major disruption caused you a lot of trouble. Disruptions in the sub top have a smaller worldwide impact, but for you they're just as disruptive if it's your supplier that goes down.
Not all issues lead to outright disruptions: many businesses and organizations also suffer from needless delays and high cost caused by inefficiency. This is even much more common than complete disruptions.
Less competition leads to more disruptions
The EU sometimes goes too far in it's anti cartel rules and regulations and in outlawing practices that frustrate competition. Still, I'd rather see them do too much than too little. Because recent developments clearly show that the market dominance of big tech motivates big players to prefer profit over quality. At least I can't think of a big tech player that hasn't had a big disruption recently due to quality issues. That impacted a lot of their customers. It’s already come to services going down for 4 hours getting labeled as a 'short disruption' these days. Seriously, how much turnover do you lose when your website is down for 4 hours? Or when your employees get a free afternoon off?
How strong is your Vendor lock-in?
How strongly do you depend on your various suppliers? How quickly and how easily can you get rid of your larger suppliers if they turn a corner that's not good for your business? Or when they confront you with unreasonable price hikes? The large vendors, and many smaller ones go to great lengths to keep you on board once you're their customer. And by that I don't mean the nice trips you get offered posing as a partner program. No, they're taking technical measure to make it very difficult - and if they can get away with it impossible - for you to bring your business to a competitor. And if we’re honest, they're succeeding, right?
Once you're in and it's become very expensive to migrate to a different ecosystem, they're no longer motivated to deliver quality. Sure, they fix glaring bugs, but they don't do much more than what's strictly necessary.
We've experienced too often that both large and smaller suppliers are unwilling to fix proven problems. Or only at the expense of the customer, even though it's clearly the supplier's shortcoming. The suppliers that are willing to fix things often lack the knowledge to locate the root causes and improve the quality of the software. Almost always there's no urgency because the customer can't migrate to a different product easily or because the customer does not generate a significant part of the revenue. I can easily replace you by ten others is what they often think ...
Software degrades: an underestimated problem
If you read my blogs you know I say this more often. In my opinion, it cannot be emphasized often enough: software degrades and that causes an increasing number of us problems. This is is demonstrated by the increasing number of disruptions we see. Maintenance costs money, but delaying maintenance eventually costs even more. Sometimes complete replacement is even cheaper than continued maintenance.
Maintaining your own digital ecosystem is already quite a job. A job that's put off till later often, with all the consequences you'd expect. But what are the consequences when your supplier lets their software go to waste as we're seeing more often? An example is Microsoft, they had not performed serious maintenance on it's anti malware API for 15 years, which led to the CrowdStrike crisis. On top of that they are not making any move to do anything about it now, so it can happen again tomorrow.
When you pick a supplier, ask them about their maintenance and replacement policies. If your not getting a clear answer or no answer at all, is this really the supplier you want to do business with?
So how do I tackle this problem?
With the really big suppliers, big tech and the larger sub top, this will probably need to be fixed by rules and regulations. In the past we've seen often enough that theses parties only start to move when billion dollar fines are on the table. And even then they try to wiggle their way out of it.
With smaller suppliers your chances are much better. Before you start long projects it's really important to discuss with them what their position is. Make clear agreements about who will pay for wat. For the analysis and for the solution. This prevents discussions later.
If you want to start a promising trajectory with your supplier then book an appointment with me, no strings attached. Together, you and me and possibly your supplier, we'll determine what's needed to bring the software quality on par again.