What are the five most frequent IT failures businesses face?

Over many audits and client engagements, we see the same five breakdowns happen repeatedly—failures that go beyond simple glitches and instead erode trust, increase costs, and expose vulnerabilities. Here’s what to watch out for:

• .     Set-and-Forget Infrastructure – Systems get installed and then neglected: unpatched servers, outdated firewalls, or switches on the brink of failure. Without proactive upkeep, this neglect leads to downtime and security flaws.
• .     Compliance Checklist Mentality – Treating compliance as a checkbox rather than a culture. Organizations acknowledge vulnerabilities during audits but never truly resolve them. That approach leaves gaps open when the auditors aren’t looking.
• .     Single Point of Failure (SPOF) – Dependence on one critical component (a server, network path, or key person) means when that fails, the whole operation crashes. Redundancy is essential.
• .     Frankenstein Network – Over time, different tools and services are stitched together haphazardly. The result is a confusing, poorly documented, and insecure environment that’s nearly impossible to maintain or scale.
• .     Vendor Blame Game – With multiple vendors managing pieces of infrastructure, outages often turn into finger-pointing contests instead of coordinated fixes. That delays resolution and compounds damage.