Published by Tenth Gear Consulting

Actionable: taking inventory and assessing the risk

Start of the year is a good time to evaluate your tech disaster planning, analyze potential exposure and review contingency plan.

While you can’t foresee all risk, it pays to be defensive. Identify areas where

• your business depends on the platforms and systems you do not control

• the critical data is stored outside of your reach

• your business decisions and operations are driven by restricted technical capabilities

Here are few examples:

Marketing

If social media marketing is part of your lead generation strategy, what would happen to the funnel if the channel disappears?

7 million businesses grappled with this exact question while TikTok ban was discussed.

Hacking and account bans are devastating but well known threats. Losing years of hard work due to political decision is a new and unexpected angle.

If you haven’t already, setting up systems to own your content, be able to present it on your website and own your followers contact list is a prudent task.

Website

Ongoing WordPress leadership discourse threatens the stability of the platform which in turn increases the risk of disruption to business operations.

Consider the impact of broken plugins and installs, lack of critical security updates and patches and reduced speed of feature development - and how it can affect your business continuity.

Having a fully fleshed out “just in case” migration plan is prudent.

Data

Last month Bench, an accounting startup that provided SaaS for small/midsize businesses shut down without any warning. While customers can still download their data, they have until March to do so - but the situation could have been made much worse if download was not readily available during the critical end of year time.

Who has your data? Relying on SaaS may make it feel that backups are the relic from the past, but companies can and do go under or experience catastrophic failures, hacking and data loss.

Do you have a local copy? How old is it? Not all data is valuable - but the exercise to list and categorize your data is.

Vendor lock-in

Having multiple vendors to support your business processes is convenient and cost effective, but perform annual evaluation on how easy would it be for you to leave them and what the cost of transition may be.

Why planning to leave? The reason may be external - unsustainable cost increases, vendor focus shift to enterprise customers, decision to take product or service in a different direction resulting in a loss of an important feature.

The reason may also be internal - as your company grows and changes, previously sufficient solution is now a blocker.

This exercise helps to identify incoming change point after which the balance of convenience and cost tips.

Looking for inspiration for your annual check?

Grab this document to start.

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