By Chris Brill, Field CTO, Myriad360
The Risks of Technology Over-Reliance
Reliance on a single platform or technology can be seductive. It promises efficiency, alignment, and simplicity—especially when you’re investing heavily in a tool that delivers value across multiple layers of your business. When you bet on a solution, it makes sense to maximize its impact. You push to get every ounce of value, embedding it deeply into processes, infrastructure, and even organizational culture. But this same logic can create significant risk: the broader your reliance, the harder it becomes to pivot when the environment shifts.
The Vulnerability of Dependency
Every organization that leans heavily on a single technology carries an inherent risk. The problem isn’t just a potential failure of the tool itself—it’s the operational sprawl that builds around it. Over time, organizations design workflows, teams, and even customer-facing strategies that depend on a particular platform.
Take, for example, situations where vendors are acquired, drastically change pricing structures, or discontinue critical features. I’ve seen organizations react to these events with panic, rushing to find short-term fixes while grappling with how deeply embedded the dependency has become. In one case, a client realized that a critical application had dozens of interconnected workflows relying on a platform that suddenly became cost-prohibitive. The realization wasn’t immediate—it came only after scrambling to assess options and uncovering just how entwined the platform was with their daily operations.
This kind of scenario highlights the real cost of dependency: inflexibility. Once workflows are tied too tightly to a single tool, the ability to adapt, innovate, or even negotiate with the vendor is sharply reduced.
Case Study: CDK Global Cyberattack
In 2024, CDK Global, a major software provider for U.S. car dealerships, suffered a cyberattack that forced dealerships to revert to manual operations. This brought ~50% of the US dealership market to its knees. This incident highlighted the vulnerability of industries that rely heavily on a few dominant software providers, emphasizing the risks of over-reliance on single vendors.
Strategic Steps to Build Resilience
Breaking free from over-reliance doesn’t happen by accident. It requires deliberate, sustained effort—and most importantly, a mandate from leadership to make strategic resilience a priority.
Audit Regularly: Build regular assessments into your operations. Instead of asking, “Are we overly dependent?” focus on the specific scenarios: What happens if this platform goes offline? If the vendor raises prices? If the product evolves in a direction that doesn’t suit our needs? These questions turn abstract concerns into actionable insights.
Diversify Purposefully: Diversification isn’t about using as many tools as possible—it’s about balance. Strategically split reliance across solutions. For instance, balancing on-premises and cloud systems creates flexibility without sacrificing control.
Develop Contingency Plans: Contingencies aren’t just for downtime. They prepare your organization to handle pricing changes, acquisitions, and even obsolescence. For every critical tool in your stack, map out the alternatives and understand the implications of transitioning—financially, operationally, and culturally.
Evaluate Interdependencies: Go beyond individual platforms and consider how tightly integrated your tools are with one another. If one falls, does the rest of the stack crumble? Identify these points of failure and plan mitigations in advance.
The Role of Leadership in Resilience
Resilience is a mindset, and it starts at the top. A proactive approach to evaluating dependencies and preparing for change requires more than operational discipline—it demands leadership with a clear mandate for strategic thinking. Leaders need to challenge the instinct to always prioritize speed and simplicity over thoughtful evaluation.
When leadership creates space for deliberate assessments, their organizations aren’t just prepared for change—they thrive in it. It takes leadership to empower teams to challenge assumptions, explore alternatives, and keep asking hard questions. Building resilience isn’t an exclusively technical task for when disruption strikes—it’s a continuous process embedded into the culture and strategy of the business.