IT Buyers Face More Regulatory Risks For Business Interruptions

In yesterday's post about Cisco, we stated our belief that IT buyers, whatever their justifiable complaints against their traditional suppliers, need them as real partners going forward because of the increasing risks IT leaders face if their systems suffer business interruptions.

In today's Journal, the case of Royal Bank of Scotland made the business pages as RBS paid a fine of $88 million for an IT failure that kept customers from accessing or transacting from their accounts reportedly for weeks.

British regulators opined that there wasn't a underinvestment in IT systems which led to the failure, but rather an absence of adequate software testing systems which led to the outage.  Heaven only knows how regulators who were asleep during the global financial meltdown suddenly have become expert in software implementation and testing.  This is, however, the world in which IT buyers, particularly in financial services, are going to function from now on.

To save pennies on a project, bring in newer,smaller unproven partners, or to piece together hardware, software and services on an a la carte basis would be a risky way to do business and it wouldn't be good for an IT exec's career.

The Four Horsemen of Tech will continue to have an advantage going forward in the new world of IT, if they can change their go to market strategies and become more customer-centric: they don't have any other options.