How To Mitigate The Threat of IT Hardware Shortages

In this Opinion piece, Mark Kirby, Executive Director, Intersys, looks at the ongoing supply chain issues which may well affect the ability insurance brands have to upgrade or replace IT hardware in 2023;

Companies around the world are still feeling the effects of a global shortage of computer chips and other essential IT hardware components in the wake of the pandemic.

While supply chain disruption is slowly easing as restrictions are lifted around the world, firms could still face delays of weeks or months to receive replacement components if they don’t have redundancies in place. And as we have seen with the Ukraine crisis, all it takes is another major global event for the situation to quickly worsen again.

As businesses start to implement their business goals for 2023, we have been busy with disaster recovery testing for our clients.

It is vital any business understand its IT risks, exposures and tolerances. That means knowing which components are business-critical as well as your Restore Point Objective (RPO) – how much data you are willing to lose in the event of a system outage – and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – how long you can tolerate between the moment a disaster is announced and the return to normal operations.

Firms should run simulations to see how operating without certain hardware would affect them in the real world and to test their disaster response and business continuity plans (BCPs).

In our experience, infrastructure equipment has been the hardest to get hold of.

We are advising our clients to invest in spare networking equipment and servers to avoid potentially damaging business interruptions. For many organisations, the cost of doing this will be relatively minor compared to the potential financial impact of lost revenues or operational disruptions. We have heard of companies having to use desktop hardware because it took them months to get a replacement server!

With more volatility likely in 2023, operational resilience is key and IT system downtime is a threat no company can afford to overlook.