What’s our risk exposure? It’s a question every government or public sector organisation faces when it comes to making a major decision – like procuring big IT services.

Risk assessment is an integral part of any strategy-execution process, and should be rationalised by a determination that the upside potential clearly outweighs the downside of ‘doing nothing’ (often viewed as the safer option).

Ultimately, the risk assessment dialogue – whether a risk is desirable or undesirable – should be defined by an organisation’s appetite for risk and tolerance, alongside an appraisal of the impact on finance, people and reputation.

But all too often there’s a tendency to think more about ‘What’s my crisis communications strategy in the event that something goes wrong?’, rather than a detailed evaluation of the financial and operational risk parameters.

There’s a big difference between mitigating risk and shifting blame. Surely, it’s far better to ask; ‘What’s the genuine risk to my department’s or agency’s business – and how do I plan to mitigate that?’

That’s especially true when it comes to data centre services. The Crown Hosting Data Centres procurement framework substantially reduces operational risk and costs for public sector departments and organisations, providing the fastest, simplest access to secure data centre services.

In March this year, Magnus Falk, deputy government chief technology officer (CTO), told the Public Sector ICT Summit that public sector bodies should stop owning and running their own data centres in house – because the cost and scale made it unsustainable.

The new Crown Hosting Data Centres service enables public sector and government organisations to move away from spending cycles that typically involve the investment of millions of pounds every few years and towards flexible contracts, than can be exited in as little as one month.

It also makes it possible for government to tap into the latest technology advances – including extremely energy efficient technologies. And, quickly too. We are talking days instead of months.

So, when it comes to data centre services, perhaps the risk mitigation discussion today should be focused more on concerns over execution – and how to make the migration process as smooth as possible?

Steve Hall