#riskadverse

[blipsandbeeps]

Verdict is still out on sheep for little Olivia 🤔 #riskadverse #toddlerlife #babygirl #curiousbaby #zoo #pettingzoo #baby #girl #happy (at Fort Worth Zoo) https://www.instagram.com/p/CeBOR3xum8F/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[chaosreader]

Betting Your Business - Part 3 - Other Crucial Criteria

In the first two parts of this case study, the identification of a significant business opportunity coupled with technical assets that were essential to the operation meant that choosing a platform was a necessary part of the enterprise’s viability. Solitaire Interglobal Ltd. (SIL) a knowledge that security was the primary criterion, but once the data on that essential metric was gathered, there were other requirements that had to be met.

Although it was difficult to see past the urgent need for security, including data protection and privacy, there were other high priority requirements for the new venture to become a reality. That area of platform feasibility included the capability of the selected platform to scale since the demand for capacity would have significant peaks.

Additionally, the entire area of quality of service would need to be considered since the end customer response would be driven by consistent delivery and meeting expectations of speed.

Existing streaming services have significant issues with erratic delivery, broken links, and spotty coverage. Although the proposed new venture does not share many of the characteristics of current video streaming, its reception would be adversely affected by any of those problems.

With a significant growth potential and a worldwide launch planned, the nature of an active cyber market indicated a need to balance the risk of exploding demand against an infrastructure that could quickly and easily scale to address any level of capacity demand.

Realizing that the criteria in this area addressed the raw ability to scale, financial considerations were not addressed at this point. Instead, the ability of the platforms under consideration to handle peak workload without infrastructure modification and the load thresholds that could be maintained on an ongoing basis were examined.

Additional factors that played into the evaluation in this area included any delay in supplemental capacity availability and the degree of automation that was possible to remove the human element from the execution timeline.

FINANCIAL COSTS Of course, there was a financial component to the evaluation. After all, just because it’s possible to provide a service doesn’t mean that there is a commercial justification for doing so.

There were several areas of financial metrics that were identified as critical to the decision. They can be summarized as:

• Cost to deploy the initial application in terms of weighted time expense • Cost of security, both initial and ongoing • Cost of scalability, both core and associated with growth

As with most things, the analysis showed that it is not the initial cost that is the most substantial, but the upkeep and ongoing operations financial impact. Therefore, the total cost of ownership (TCO) was the primary metric used.

RISK The perspective that SIL takes when viewing risk is that it is an accumulation of not only the possibility of shortfalls in protection, deployment, and operations, but the metric must include the scope of the impact of that failure. Given that, the risk evaluation was structured to build an accumulated risk metric that would provide the decision-making team with a consistent and useful criterion.

Since SIL risk analysis is built on an actuarial basis, the extensive data reported by SIL customers and participants in GSW was used to create that complex probability matrix. With an excess of 164 million discrete data points, each of the possible platform solutions received intense scrutiny.

RISK-BASED SOLUTION FILTERING SIL works with millions of model requests every year. One of its strengths is the massive database the covers the aspects of risk and behavior. Any time that a SIL model is requested, that ocean of data is mined for possibilities. Over 50% of these predictive models start out with more than 500 options.

Depending on the parameters set by SIL customers, the field is narrowed down to a more comprehensible number of scenarios before being further culled. This is a process that is executed hundreds of times per day in the SIL analytic labs.

This standard SIL process produced an initial field of 712 possible scenarios for internal SIL consideration. After the first round reduction, 137 were left. These included on-premise infrastructures, public cloud solutions, MSP offerings, and hybrid cloud infrastructures. All of these options were modeled to build comparison points. The consolidated risk rating was used to do the first level cut.

Any scenario with a risk rating of over 15 was deemed unacceptable, and anything rated more than 10 discarded as significantly high risk. The general risk metric for the solutions can be seen in the chart below.

All of the solutions that exceeded the threshold for high risk were eliminated, and only those that were medium to low risk were considered.

This group of shortlisted platform solutions included only five scenarios. Each of these was reviewed in more detail.

None of the solutions presented a low-risk profile. This was not unexpected since the venture being considered was a significant paradigm shift in both the streaming and entertainment environment. In any new creative endeavor, there is a considerable element of risk, and that was not ignored when building the evaluation profile.

However, the platform contribution obviously needed to be minimized, so that the overall feasibility of the project was not additionally burdened.

The evaluation committee found it extremely interesting that all of the shortlisted scenarios shared key components that addressed security and scalability. To differentiate among the options in this group, the secondary criteria would have to be factored in, but first, verification of operational abilities was required for the first two areas.

Coming up next, Results

[chaosreader]

Search for a Safe and Scalable Platform

Thousands of companies make decisions every day on where and how to deploy new features of their operations and sometimes are lucky enough to explore totally new ventures. Usually, Solitaire Interglobal Ltd. (SIL) is involved in this type of decision-making only in modeling the opportunity, risk, and cost of proposed solutions.

In early 2018, however, SIL found itself in a different position. Intellectual capital that had been developed over the last several decades coalesced with market opportunity, and SIL’s internal analysts identified a possible new, disruptive technology that SIL was uniquely positioned to deploy. The decision was made to investigate this using SIL’s normal processes. In the first step, opportunity and risk projects are always analyzed against a tremendously large, multi-petabyte database. This allows weaknesses and strengths to be quantified and supported.

Additionally, since SIL has been running Global Security Watch for more than 23 years, exhaustive business risk information was available to mine for crucial nuggets of information. The resulting data on security, financial impact, longevity, and broad risk allowed SIL to evaluate the opportunity.

With extensive supporting detail, SIL’s strategic committee came to a quick decision to proceed and attacked the next step of critical thinking.

This next step was the establishment of the criteria. The individual metrics clustered in four primary areas.

Security

Platform Feasibility

Financial Costs

Risk

It is not surprising that this list looks like a summary of many articles that are written today about doing business over the Internet. The number one area is security for most digital marketplace organizations. This goal encompasses the safeguard of uninterrupted business operations and exclusive control of proprietary digital assets.

Only after that primary requirement is assured our metrics for feasibility, finances, and general risk pertinent.

In the process of choosing a safe and scalable environment, SIL experienced firsthand what thousands of their clients have been living each day. It was an exercise in empathy for many of SIL’s analysts, with remote analysis colliding with practical business considerations.

The resulting guidelines and best practices that were derived from both the extensive analytics and SIL’s business experience have been used to construct a multipart case study that hopefully will provide some guidance and other organizations search for a secure, efficient, and effective platform for deployment.