Generally not understood is that effective contingency planning can provide major competitive advantage and significant financial benefit. Both especially important in difficult economic times. Keep following the herd, suffer herd ailments. Please bear those factors in mind with what follows.
Doing nothing extra inevitably costs you far more because of inevitable disruptions and widespread lack of strategic planning for users of predominant IT systems. There's far better uses for the huge amounts of money and time expended on dealing with typical resulting disruptions.
The 2017 Equifax IT disruption cost them over $200 million because they ignored a simple plan costing less than $100.
You need to use an unconventional plan to avoid your business inevitably losing a heap of money. Because the actual massive scale of the problem isn't widely publicised. The situation concerns us, and should concern you, because we all pay for the resulting massive disruptions by way of increased prices and reduced services.
A Radio NZ March 2025 article reinforces what we and our associates have observed about business cyber security.
Further reinforced by cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont's May 2025 article, which contains a lot of excellent information, including "... and I’ve spent that decade calling on both businesses and governments to take this problem seriously. Which is kind of like pissing in the wind, it turns out, as people can’t see a problem until it directly impacts them — see also, climate change."
We lead by example. Our main risks are from hardware failure and software bugs, with malware risk being miniscule. Our target is 10 minutes maximum downtime. We improve our response for anything that causes longer downtime.
Backing-up data is a good start, but you also need to preserve operational functionality, which is effectively impossible with the predominant business systems as-supplied except for trivial events.
Effective contingency planning increases your competitive advantage and safety, in part by enabling you to focus more confidently on producing, knowing that the inevitable disruptions will be rapidly contained and neutralised.
If that sort of idea doesn't appeal to you then whenever you're an airline passenger you'd better hope that it does to the pilots, because the change to that approach improved flight safety enormously.
Rather than being just a cost, evidence shows that for the predominant IT systems using expertly generated contingency plans generates returns on investment ranging from good to huge and beyond.
To make our concerns more than just 'noise', we've documented techniques and mainstream technologies that we use in our contingency planning and which will benefit most other businesses. We also offer services for implementing elements of the plan for businesses that prefer to benefit from our expertise and automation. We're currently updating our documentation to take account of the evolving IT landscape. Watch this space. And if your business can't wait you can send us a summary of your IT system and we'll consider sending you relevant updated documents if they're ready.We've been providing comprehensive support for IT systems for over 20 years. For some time we've been able to install systems on 'bare' remote machines via the Internet - very securely.
Many years ago, and well before it became fashionable, we decided to minimise client site visits for reasons of efficiency and cost.©2021-2025 : IOPEN Technologies Ltd - NZ