Every Dollar Protecting Non-Critical Systems Is a Dollar You Won't Have When It Actually Matters

How to map what's mission-critical versus what's just inconvenient when resources are finite

Running a 911 center teaches you that you can’t backup everything.

Resources are finite. Budget is finite. Attention is finite. You make choices about what gets protected and what doesn’t.

The challenge is knowing which failures would actually stop operations versus which would just be inconvenient.

We need redundant radio systems. If those fail, we can’t communicate with first responders. That’s mission-critical. We need backup power for dispatch consoles. Without that, we can’t answer calls or dispatch units. Also mission-critical.

Do we need backup printers at the backup site? Backup desk phones in every office? Redundant break room appliances?

Not really. Those failures create workarounds. They’re manageable. Annoying, but not operational stoppers.

Every dollar spent fortifying something that isn’t actually critical is a dollar not available for the systems that keep you running during a crisis.

We’ve gotten better at mapping the critical path. What must work for us to receive emergency calls, dispatch appropriate units, and coordinate multi-agency response? Those systems get redundancy.

Everything else gets documented workarounds and acceptance that some inconvenience is tolerable.

It’s not perfect. We still discover dependencies we didn’t fully appreciate. A database we thought was supplementary turns out to be more important than expected. A reporting tool that seemed optional becomes critical during certain incident types.

But strategic fortification at the actual critical points beats trying to duplicate everything and protecting nothing adequately.