Smbs Archives - Tech Prognosis Blog

NBA Fines And Non-Compliance Lessons for SMBs

Regulations on the local, state, and federal levels are on the rise and this is putting a lot of pressure on compliance efforts of Small and Medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and exposing the fact that these organizations can only avoid costly fines and/or lawsuits for non-compliance by maintaining strict compliance throughout their information management processes.

I found the fines levied by the National Basketball Association (NBA) on players including the likes of the late Los Angeles Lakers Great, Kobe Bryant, and Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, among others, as a good lesson on the cost of non-compliance.

The NBA has consistently fined players who were in non-compliance of its rules and these violations range from the serious to what one could argue is the absurd – like kicking a ball in frustration or throwing a basketball into the stands in celebration of a win.

Question: What is the cost of a hardware failure to your business? If you are like most business owners, you are already calculating the cost of the server, hard drive, installation cost etc. But is that really the cost to your business? To put it another way, what would it cost you to replace the DATA that was lost? That, to me, is the actual cost. How many months will it take to re-enter your accounting or customer data for example if your server’s hard drive were to simply kaput and become unavailable? For those lucky ones who have not experienced it, pray it does not happen to you. For those of us who have experienced it, we know it will never happen again, right?

Business owners have a false sense of security when it comes to the issue of Business Continuity which is often thought of as just an IT (Information Technology) problem. “We have a good backup system so we are fine”. There is often the tendency to overlook flaws on business processes, application development, and logistics.