Cannabis Resiliency: Pay Attention to IT

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Benjamin Franklin

Resiliency must be on every cannabis strategy agenda.  Many supply chain, regulatory and IT snafus can arise, crippling a company’s ability to run its business or even survive.  

Let’s consider one common risk, IT disruption. Serious incidents have plagued most weed firms, the most noteworthy being Dutchie's 4/20 crashes.  

Major outages (including cyber) are a ticking time bomb in firms with patchwork infrastructures running bespoke yet immature cannabis applications. 

These vulnerabilities are getting worse.  Transaction volumes are increasing, including surges around holidays and special events.  System complexity is growing, magnifying the number of possible failure points. Finally, new applications are being layered (often clumsily) onto first generation ERP infrastructures.

The riskiest systems are seed-to-sale, cultivation operations and e-commerce.   

Through my IT work, I learned firsthand the importance of Franklin’s adage.  Clients that performed independent software testing had higher system uptimes and better consumer experiences, and ultimately, superior business results. 

An ounce of prevention

First, you want to understand your IT vulnerabilities and performance profile. Start by undertaking functional and load testing on your infrastructure and mission-critical applications. Quality testing will identify what should be left alone, fixed or redesigned with new solutions.

One testing firm that gets industries like cannabis is Qualadi.  I asked their CEO, David Elharar, to explore Dutchie’s failures:

1. The system stumbled under surge load conditions.  Basically, customer demand exceeded the infrastructure's available computing resources at that time.  This insufficiency could trace to network pipeline limitations, design flaws or a lack of server capacity & load scheduling. 

2. Management is not dumb; they may have prioritized other areas like UX design or building APIs, or under-invested in capacity.

3. There is a silver lining.  Surge loads would provide Dutchie with valuable data to finally improve their system's robustness and performance, likely at a lower cost now that they gained real-world demand patterns.

However, this is little consolation for the many retailers who experienced serious outages not to mention consumers.

Fact is, these land mines could have been identified early with proper, independent testing. 

4. Fed up retailers may consider switching to a competitor.  However, these applications could also buckle under peak loads, given their own system and investment constraints.

Prudent MSOs & LPs should undertake preemptive testing to understand potential risks plus ensure their infrastructure & applications can scale as the firm grows and complexity increases.

#software #qualityassurance #IT #testing