The Greatest Risk to Manage: Your Customer Experience
Downtime Is Not Your Only Risk
At its core, the job of your infrastructure is to be available for your employees, your partners, your vendors, and most importantly, your customers. Loss of availability is not the only risk looming in your infrastructure, however. There are many potential issues that can lead to customer dissatisfaction or damage your organization’s reputation and prospects of success.
Let’s take a look at a few of these risk factors.
Availability: No, it is not the only one, but the most visible and important operational risk is availability. While not your team’s exclusive role, limiting downtime is job one for most infrastructure ops teams.
It’s hard to believe it has been over six years since the emergency hit, but one thing COVID-19 did for the business world was increase expectations on IT availability and performance. The impressive execution of IT teams during COVID raised the assumptions that there should always be an ability to access important IT functions and interfaces from any device, anywhere, at any time.
In addition to being sure that your own infrastructure is as resilient as possible, you must be prepared to immediately adjust to outages that others may cause. Mistakes and problems can have a cascading impact, as stranded Philly air passengers experienced recently. Outages caused by cloud providers are far from rare and a plan for immediate remediation is required.
Beyond functionality, simply the act of staying up and running, a strong availability stance is also a significant component of compliance, primarily the achievement and maintenance of important certifications mandated by government or simply expected or required within your industry.
Legacy data centers, those near (or beyond) the end of their planned lifespan, can increase the risk of downtime caused by aging or malfunctioning power infrastructure or equipment.
Security: No matter whether it is your fault or caused by a vendor, the day your customers get a “your data may have been lost in a breach” notification may be the day your they begin (or accelerate) their discussions with your competitors.
There are multiple layers of security for you to implement, and the data center component of it, the physical layer, is not always designed and/or executed properly or completely. This is particularly the case if an on-site infrastructure deployment like an office-adjacent small data center or server closet is part of the mix.
Expenses: If you are one of the many organizations to have runaway cloud costs and are forced to cut back on other tech initiatives or even raise prices, which may damage your customer experience and retention. A new cost risk factor needing to be addressed by many is AI cost exceeding budget.
Latency: For many workloads and applications, a standard level of latency is acceptable, while others have a greater “need for speed” to meet customer expectations. A 2026 report shows that 3% of mobile users will abandon a website that takes more than a second to load, a small number, but one that can have an outsized impact on a retailer among other businesses.
The thought that low latency is typically best delivered by the cloud is a misnomer. Plenty of cloud traffic in our region runs through Ashburn, Virginia, which is far from ideal for latency sensitive workloads and the customer experience. The advent of SD-WANs and cloud ramps like Megaport can offer a geographically dispersed company better latency on overall corporate applications as opposed to the slower process of directly accessing all of your applications through clouds that run through Northern Virginia.
Is Hybrid Colocation Your Solution for Risk Management? We’re just scratching the surface of issues that add to your risk. A well-thought-out hybrid colocation strategy allows you to have choices that avoid a cloud provider being a single source of failure, gives you multiple connectivity options, and allows you to pivot as your requirements change.