The misconfiguration cost is usually not calculable in itself. But I think the more important issue is, "How do we prevent it?" I would spend more time on prevention than assessing the cost. I can think of several minor provisioning issues that cost us more in customer relations than everything else put together and a couple significant ones that seemed like nothing happened. And I am not sure I could have predicted the outcome the day before the event if someone had handed me the scenario to assess it. Reason, when it happens the CURRENT situation is as much a driver of the impact as is the actual event. It even goes back to the emotional state of the customer and maybe if his toast was burned this morning, if he/she had a fight with the spouse, who flipped him the bird during his drive in and a lot of other things that dictate mental state. I would be very lax to use a vendor who is taking an approach that all they are concerned about is what an error costs them. I want them to be more concerned about what that costs their customer (me) and what they can do to prevent it. Proper Prior Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Training, sound processes, good management practices, good maintenance, good personnel selection go a long way. To quote Chief Gassaway (fire chief with good stuff on the web for any business) "Luck validates bad practices." The REB translation, "We did it this way for years and nothing bad happened." In Chief Gassaway's business, bad practices cause Line of Duty Deaths. In ours it causes outages, lost revenue and possibly bankruptcy. Remember, if your company goes belly up, you are out of a job... http://www.samatters.com/2012/07/31/positive-reinforcement-of-undesirabl e-behavior/ Ralph Brandt -----Original Message----- From: George Herbert [mailto:george.herbert@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2012 9:17 PM To: Diogo Montagner Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: cost of misconfigurations On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 5:32 PM, Diogo Montagner <diogo.montagner@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Darius,
You are right. The lost of a customer due to those things. However, I would classify this as an unknown situation (in terms of risk analisys) because the others I mentioned are possible to calculate and estimate (they are known). But it is very hard to estimate if a customer will cancel the contract because 1 or n network outages. In theory, if the customer SLA is not being met consecutively, there is a potential probability he will cancel the contract.
Regards
On the end customer side, I've done a bunch of reliability / risk cost assessments for various customers over the years. It's never easy. For an ISP... customers are fairly locked in, but for big networks and customers, especially multihoming customers, business goes where they want it. SLA costs are easy. Predicting the final financial impact is hard. -- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com