Problem:
I previously was at a company that was primarily Windows server based; however, they had one old AIX operating system server. The server was very old, out of maintenance, and the risk had been weighed that they would not replace the hardware as they wanted to eventually replace the business application that ran on the server with a replacement product. However, at the time a project was not even in progress to replace the system.
The server ended up failing. While there was a backup server, the tape backups of the data from the server could not be read by the backup server. This was the primary response plan. The tapes and old server were then sent to an external vendor to try to retrieve and save the data, as a contingency effort. This eventually was able to be done, but they were without a critical business system for over a week, without an accurate picture of the data in the system. Talk about a business nightmare.
Do you have examples you can share that you've either read about or had experience with, where it was not possible to eliminate/resolve the risk, but just control it to reduce impact to the project?