You can spend a lot of time assessing a supplier before you bring them into the environment.
Then, once they’re established and everything is working, you spend less time thinking about what would happen if they suddenly weren’t there.
That’s understandable.
If you’ve been using the same provider for five years and they’ve never given you any cause for concern, planning for their failure can feel fairly unnecessary when you compare it with everything else demanding your attention.
The problem is that your dependency on them may have grown during those five years.
They might now hold important data, provide infrastructure that other systems rely on, or support a service the business would struggle to operate without.
If the supplier runs into trouble, you inherit part of that problem.
We saw plenty of reminders of this during the disruption caused by major technology providers in recent years. A supplier can have its own incident, outage or business problem, but your users will still be asking you when they can work again.
That’s why planning beforehand is useful.
You want to understand how exposed you are if a key provider becomes unavailable and what options you realistically have. With some suppliers, you may be able to move relatively quickly. With others, replacing them could be a substantial project.
The difficulty is finding time to work through scenarios that may never happen when there are plenty of things already happening that need your attention today.
Supplier reviews can easily concentrate on performance, renewals and current requirements, while resilience gets less attention because the service has been reliable.
Co-managed support can give you more capacity to look at those dependencies properly and build contingency planning into the way the environment is managed.
Then, if a supplier does run into trouble, you already understand what it means for your environment and what options are available.
If you’d like to discuss how co-managed support could create more time for work like this, we’d love to talk. Get in touch.