Generally not understood is that effective contingency planning can provide major competitive advantage and significant financial benefit. Both being especially important in difficult economic times. As with forms of insurance it helps to make an effort to visualise the risks. Please bear all those factors in mind with what follows.

We understand that you’re doing your best with what BigTech makes available. And that you understand that there’s significant things they don’t tell you because doing so would significantly reduce their profits. We’re trying to help you see more clearly and completely.

Doing nothing extra inevitably costs you far more because of inevitable disruptions for users of predominant IT systems. The massive actual scale of the problem isn't widely publicised, and there's far better uses for the relatively huge amounts of money and time expended on dealing with typical disruption events.

The 2017 Equifax IT disruption cost them over $200 million because they ignored a simple plan costing less than $100.

At this time (2025-05-17) two large UK businesses (Co-op and M&S) are still badly affected by invasions that happened in late April. Attackers got past their 'Enterprise Grade' defences very easily. M&S had no clear contingency plans and their total cost estimate is £300 million. Co-op has fared much better because a year ago they 'war-gamed' an invasion and knew to shut down devices. The BBC is providing a lot of detail : [1] [2].

Many NZ businesses are getting badly hit too. Further evidence that conventional business IT defences are inadequate. In large part because BigTech prefers getting income from ‘security’ subscriptions to expending effort on making systems harder to disrupt.

So to avoid your business inevitably losing a heap of money it’s clear that unconventional plans are needed. The situation concerns us, and should concern you, because we all pay for the massive disruptions by way of increased prices and reduced services.

A Radio NZ March 2025 article reinforces what we and our associates have observed about business cyber security.

Further reinforced by cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont's May 2025 article, which contains a lot of excellent information, including "... and I’ve spent that decade calling on both businesses and governments to take this problem seriously. Which is kind of like pissing in the wind, it turns out, as people can’t see a problem until it directly impacts them — see also, climate change."

We lead by example. Our main risks are from hardware failure and software bugs, with malware risk being miniscule. Our target is 10 minutes maximum downtime. We improve our response for anything that causes longer downtime.

Not a recent development. In a previous company long ago one of us single-handedly created computers to sit on production-lines and process their items. They exchanged data with office PCs and continued operating fully when office PCs failed. Optimised for the environment - low power, high performance, no moving parts, highly flexible, extremely reliable, networked, software updating via network, data and software stored in battery-backed Static RAM. In use for around 20 years, initially in NZ meatworks but spread to a wide range of plants in NZ and elsewhere.

Backing-up data is a good start. Also needed is preserving work-flow functionality, which BigTech doesn't concern itself much with, but which our recommendations can.

Effective contingency planning increases your competitive advantage and safety, in part by enabling you to focus more confidently on producing, knowing that the inevitable disruptions will be rapidly contained and neutralised.

If that sort of idea doesn't appeal to you then whenever you're an airline passenger you'd better hope that it does to the pilots, since it's improved flight safety enormously.

Furthermore, rather than being just a cost, evidence shows that using expertly generated contingency plans generates returns on investment ranging from good to huge.

To make our concerns more than just 'noise', we've documented techniques and mainstream technologies that we use in our contingency planning and which will benefit most other businesses. Your IT support people can implement them if they're willing to expand their capabilities. For businesses that prefer to benefit from out expertise and automation we offer services for implementing elements of the plans. We're currently updating our documentation to take account of the evolving IT landscape. Watch this space. And if your business can't wait you can send us a summary of your IT system and we'll consider sending you relevant updated documents if they're ready.

We provide commercial and industrial IT systems based on mainstream technology. Including one which is already solving one IDP (Industrial Data Processing) problem. Our innovative expert approach makes it capable of a wide range of IDP, and puts it far ahead of the competition. Collectively, our people and our associates have been involved in a vast range of industrial and commercial data-handling projects and we all look forward to providing you with an exceptional system.

Exceptional performance and protection for your business operations and data, and great interoperability with MS-Windows and Apple systems. We provide servers and a wide range of data processing systems, and all have natural immunity to MS-Windows malware.

We've been providing comprehensive support for IT systems for over 20 years. For some time we've been able to install systems on 'bare' remote machines via the Internet - very securely.

Many years ago, and well before it became fashionable, we decided to minimise client site visits for reasons of efficiency and cost.

We provide our PC-based products as VMs because of the business-resilience that they make possible. For safety and reliability we insist that they be run by a Hypervisor based on certain Enterprise Linux variants - which we can provide when necessary.

We use a powerful combination of automation, cooperation, sub-contracting, superb technology, and innovative software. Which enables us and our associates to provide system installation and support to organisations from small to large, and world-wide. Read more

You can deal with us directly, or we can get a salesperson to contact you - which will obviously significantly increase the price you'll pay. A benefit of dealing direct is that any technical questions you have can be answered directly. Either way, please start by contacting us.

We also provide consultancy services related to designing, deploying, upgrading, and hardening business IT systems. Collectively we have a wide range of expertise and experience. E.g. [1] Benefit by telling us now what improvements you think you need.