Without a proactive and strategic approach, changes to technology systems — even changes made intentionally and meant to make things better — risk unexpectedly creating a tangled mess.
Frank, the founder of an innovative e-commerce, direct-to-consumer business, hired a talented and capable web developer to redesign the company’s website. As they were drawing close to launch, the web developer requested credentials for the domain registration service to make a few minor DNS updates and switch from the old website to the new, beautiful one. A well-intentioned project manager provided the web developer with the domain management account’s super admin credentials before taking off for a long weekend.
Later that night, a few staff members realized they were no longer getting emails, and their customer service team started reporting bounced messages and automated systems failing. Even worse, marketing and sales emails were generating embarrassing flurries of messages and confused inquiries as attempts to reach them failed.
Since many of those involved had only coordinated via business emails and phones, they had no working ways to reach each other, devoting a great deal of stress trying to understand what was happening. The next morning, they finally realized the well-intentioned web developer had inadvertently made domain changes with far greater impact than anyone realized, and that those changes had disabled all inbound email for the entire company. With intense technical help, they reconfigured the DNS and fixed the issues, but they were still getting notifications and errors for days.
Worse, hundreds of important emails sent to them during this bad period were lost forever, either bounced back to senders or lost in transit.
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If the project manager had realized how great the risk was of giving the web developer such elevated access to the complex web of interconnected DNS, website, email, and other software as a service (SaaS) tools, they would not have so casually handed the developer full keys to the kingdom and stepped away!
The great importance of those credentials highlighted that the project manager should not have had access to them in the first place. A lack of understanding, weak security policies, a “move fast and break things” attitude, and a lack of IT strategy or oversight had all worked together to create a catastrophe.
When the dust finally settled nearly a week later, Frank understood that the business needed a review of access and security, incorporating a strategic assessment of their technology needs and business objectives. By not taking this seriously when the company was smaller, a website update that should have benefited the business instead created chaos and embarrassment, damaged its reputation, and caused immense amounts of stress for dozens of staff.
If the business had had a capable IT partner in place and understood the ramifications of these choices, it could have anticipated how this type of change could broadly affect operations, and this embarrassing mistake could have been avoided. Instead, the business entrusted excessive elevated access to a web developer without understanding how a DNS update could impact other parts of the business.