Your Suppliers Share More Than You Think
Most large organisations no longer own their own plumbing. They rent it, through a web of contracts that looks diverse on a procurement spreadsheet and rather less diverse underneath.
Four vendors, one cloud
During my time in second-line oversight at the Bank of England, this was the finding that kept coming back. An institution would point to four separate software providers and reasonably conclude that its exposure was spread. Then an architecture review would show all four running on the same hyperscale availability zone.
The diversification was real in the contract register and fictional in practice. When that zone went down, all four went down together.
So the question is not how many vendors you have. It is how many of them would fail in the same hour, for the same reason.
The person who knows how it works
The same pattern shows up in people. A business grows around two or three individuals who understand the legacy integration, the undocumented reconciliation, the client relationship holding a revenue line together.
None of that appears on an org chart. Then both of them are on the same flight, or in the same team, or leave in the same month, and a process nobody else can run simply stops.
Map services by what the customer experiences, not by how the company is organised. If a service cannot tolerate a four-hour outage, every dependency beneath it needs a tested alternative, not just a named one.
Discuss this scenario with Mitali Thapar
Confidential executive discussions for C-suite leadership and audit committees.