Human error, a regular occurrence often accepted by us mere mortals as a part of life, can however lead to a destructive chain of events, with repercussions not limited to the immediate financial impact, but also reputational damage, reduced productivity and even the possibility of legal consequences. A study carried out by the IT Governance Institute suggests UK businesses lose an estimated £98.6 billion a year due to human error, and if that’s not enough to make your eyes water, despite the technology available on today’s market, instances of human error are on the rise!
How does human error affect businesses?
Human error in businesses are seen in many forms, from failed system updates and failure to follow established protocols, to disregarding online safety measures including falling prey to malware and phishing attacks, to poor training. Almost all instances are preventable, with the correct measures implemented. Recent news of the eGate chaos at UK airports including Heathrow and Stanstead, saw a nationwide collapse of the UK’s passport eGate system for the second time in a year, taking four hours to fix and millions of people queuing through airports with women and children being prioritised through manually controlled passport control.
Mark Flynn, provided a quote to the Express on the issue:
“The chaos suffered by millions of travellers last night could be just the tip of the iceberg if Border Force doesn’t urgently evaluate its computer systems.
“It’s always easy to blame an IT fault, but it is mor likely due to human error when making a change. Following a change control process would have avoided this issue.
“The Border Force needs to regularly test its disaster recovery plans to ensure that they can quickly recover from a failure. This should include scenarios for both hardware failures and connectivity issues.
”This situation highlighted the risk of technical issues caused by human error, bringing the importance of setting standards to the forefront of many business owners minds.”
So, what can we do to protect businesses and eliminate the threat of human error?
At Computer Care, we recommend businesses develop their own set of standards when dealing with their technical systems, including disaster recovery strategies for when things go wrong.
Reducing the impact of human error and improve system reliability, businesses should consider a change control framework such as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library).
ITIL is a set of IT best practices designed to assist businesses in aligning their IT services.
By using ITIL, businesses can create a process to follow for changes made to their infrastructure, allowing clarity and a test process to be carried out when issues are detected.
How do Computer Care Eliminate the threat?
By implementing ITIL, we work with our customers using our CASH model to create a set of standards that cover areas including;
Cyber Security – using best of breed security appliances to keep your network and users safe and secure.
Artificial Intelligence – implementing cutting-edge tech to increase efficiencies and reduce costs.
Smart Systems Management – minimising losses incurred through downtime with our self-healing systems and applications.
and Hybrid Working – solutions developed to help increase efficiencies of remote workers.
By aligning our customers with these areas, we are ensuring top protection business-wide.
The right investment in your business tech can offer substantial savings further down the line, we recommend businesses use this real-life scenario as a benchmark to develop a framework that can be relied on to manage the impact of human error and improve the reliability of their IT infrastructure.
To discuss how our CASH model can help protect your business, get in touch with our team of IT specialists.