I often am amazed at how many companies have a single point of failure.
Daily I see this in action. I once took a drug test for a enrollment process, and the clinic I went to told me that their machine broke. There were many people there for a drug screen so it was clear this was a big seller. Why would you only have one machine?
Now someone might say that the consequence to the company is that people can reschedule and come back. No the consequence is that they get a bad reputation, which that clinic had because of poor service and they go out of business.
Having a single machine or point of failure has never made sense to me. If your business can’t afford what it takes to be reliable, then it shouldn’t be in business for health critical things like that clinic was.
Too often business say they can’t afford to have a backup or parallel processes but the cost of failure is even higher. I have worked at companies who had critical pieces of their infrastructure break like internet connectivity. I warned them before that happened, and for a very modest cost it would not be an issue. They didn’t want to listen and then something happened and the internet was down. I had to do extraordinary things to get it working again and it was very stressful.
If you think that something critical can’t break that is just denying reality. Things break all the time, and not having a backup is bad business period.