Your car breaks down, so you take it to the mechanic. You go to a (seemingly) reliable mechanic to have your car worked on. Supposedly the shop makes the appropriate changes. The problem is diagnosed and then solved – you need to fix the car. You leave your vehicle with the mechanic, and he assures it will be fixed. After the car has been worked on, you retrieve it. But as soon as you drive off the lot, the car breaks down. Even worse, you immediately recognize the sounds it’s making – the same sounds it made when you first took it in. You realize it is the same problem. You then pull up your phone and look up reviews about your mechanic. The reviews are dreadful. So, with this information, and that fact that you’re sitting in a broken down car that you just picked up from him, are you going to return to his shop?
Chances are, you’d say, “Absolutely not!” And then you’d take your car to another mechanic.
This sort of scenario is typical. When we take something of value to a business to be fixed, or overseen, or managed, you expect good results. If you do not get good results, in this case with your car, you take your business elsewhere. However, when it comes to IT services, many people and businesses do not react in this way. Instead, they stay with the same company, even when it has offered poor services.
Here’s a case in point: The NYT was recently hacked (that is our belief). However, when I reached out to the NYT for a quote about the matter, a representative was quick to reply and inform me that I was incorrect in describing it as a hack. I asked the representative why she didn’t consider it a hack. She offered a definition, and once again insisted I was wrong. I let her know that she offered a narrow definition of the term, and proceeded to explain to her why it was, indeed, a form of hacking. There is another important piece to this issue. But first, I’ll define the term hack.
At DNS Made Easy, and others in the industry, the term hack often refers to unauthorized access to something online (more definitions can be found here). In this case, whatever occurred with the NYT resulted in a compromised account. It’s plain and simple – that is a form of hacking. As mentioned before, the representative made it clear that that was not what happened. Furthermore, when I asked why they stuck with Melbourne IT, she said the following: “[A]s a matter of policy, we don’t publicly discuss our relationships with vendors.”
So this question remains unanswered: why do companies stick with vendors, such as Melbourne IT, after they fail to offer an appropriate service? If something like this, an important account, is compromised, why would a business opt to stay? Would you stay with a company like this if your account was hacked?
What do you think?
