Due Diligence
Pre-contract technology due diligence: what good looks like
How to spot real risk in a target’s technology and team before the deal closes - without slowing the deal down.
Read article →The patterns in this article come from our work with large enterprises across regulated and fast-moving sectors. The aim is not to be exhaustive - it is to surface the handful of decisions we see making the biggest difference in practice.
1. Plans don’t fail at the right moment
Most enterprise DR plans look fine on paper and fall apart on the day. The reason is almost always that they were written once, tested rarely, and quietly drifted out of date as the environment evolved.
2. Game days as a forcing function
Regular, scoped failure exercises - switching off a region, simulating a credential leak, blocking a critical dependency - turn theoretical resilience into practical resilience. They also surface the documentation gaps that no audit will ever find.
3. Design for graceful degradation
Not every part of a service needs to keep working at full quality during an incident. Designing explicit degraded modes - read-only, queued, cached - gives operators levers to pull and customers a much better experience than a hard outage.
4. Resilience is a culture, not a checklist
The organisations that recover best from incidents are the ones that treat post-incident reviews as a first-class engineering activity, blameless and well-attended. Resilience compounds when the lessons travel.
Where to start
If any of the above resonates with what you are working through, we are always happy to compare notes - without obligation. Email is the best way to reach us: customerservices@halfteck.com.