Why Jurassic Park’s biggest mistake was not hiring a better IT team

The problem with one person doing everything 

If you’ve not seen the movie in a while, and shame on you if you haven’t, the 1993 classic boils down to a severely underpaid IT genius causing a park-wide IT system failure so that he could partake in some serious industrial espionage. Nedry, the IT specialist in question, puts a bug into his code, shutting down everything, so that he has the opportunity to escape with intellectual property. 

Chaos ensues, our heroes achieve many daring escapes from a T-Rex, velociraptors, and a herd of huge, scaly turkeys. Oh, and we lose Samuel L Jackson in one of the most nightmare-inducing scenes you could imagine as a child. 

Yet, all of this could have been avoided if there had been a robust IT team with solid management and security functionality in place. Even if the villain hadn’t been actively trying to bring the whole of Jurassic Park’s network down, it’s impossible for one person to be on top of everything, regardless of the automation or Cloud-based systems in place.  

Keeping the monsters at bay 

Now, it’s highly unlikely that our servers going down are going to release a cataclysm of hungry dinosaurs into the wild. There are other consequences and threats to the inadequacies of an under-staffed and under-prepared IT team, however. 

Money is obviously one of the biggest. Any time your system isn’t functioning, your company is bleeding revenue, whether it be a large financial institution or an independent online seller. If you can’t service your customer base in whatever capacity, then you’re doomed to make a loss. 

When Amazon’s server crashed in 2018, on one of it’s biggest sales events, Amazon Prime Day, they are estimated to have lost over $70 million dollars in revenue from those few hours. The size of the company meant they were able to achieve record sales, still, yet there would have been intense conversations amongst their stakeholders as to how a business that has its own Cloud operations, AWS, could have suffered such huge losses. 

Then, there’s the trust issue. If you’re unable to provide your client-base with the service they expect, they could, and likely will, look elsewhere. Even if this is only for a period of time, the damage to sales and brand image is already done.  

Spotify experienced this with the release of Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’ album in 2022. Fans poured their outrage onto social media, and whilst the outage only lasted a few minutes, the damage to the music streaming platform’s reputation took a hit and they lost sales in ad revenue. 

An IT setup from the Jurassic period 

Whilst the image of a lone coder or IT specialist running a whole company’s back-end is something we might remember from the early days of the digital revolution, anyone will know that’s not how it operates now. 

Having a dedicated IT team is essential to the smooth and continuous running of any operation, whether it be a thrilling (see, terrifying) theme park, or a tech company. You need IT managers, cybersecurity specialists, developers, network and cloud engineers, amongst a whole host of others. One person with all of the responsibility and no oversight can, and will, make mistakes.  

An expansive IT infrastructure isn’t just important, it is the only way for an organisation that relies on the digital world (and which one doesn’t?) to be able to effectively perform in today’s world. 

From a dinosaur infrastructure to the twenty-first century 

So, what could they have done better? 

More people is the quickest and easiest answer, though this doesn’t mean anything if there isn’t real communication pathways between the departments and specialists. There’s no use a frontline IT technician discovering a bug if they aren’t then able to relay it to the developers.  

If a platform is suddenly inundated with users, overwhelming it and causing outages, and your only cloud engineer is out to lunch with no idea, then the problem becomes exacerbated. Clear lines of communication and responsibility are key with the complexity of the modern IT system. 

Then, there’s automation. In Jurassic Park, the automated systems were meant to bring the main power back on after the backup generator got the IT gear online again. This didn’t happen due to glitches in the automation process, an error that a proper IT team would likely have picked up with testing.  

Finally, there’s complacency and the lack of a backup plan. There were constant issues with the systems throughout the film long before the intentional hack, and they were much-maligned without being actioned. It was just accepted that there was a problem, probably with the outlook that they would “get to it later”.  

This type of response is likely recongisable to most, yet there was never truly a Plan B in place. Jurassic Park’s security fails without any redundancies, like servers or power, or critical data backups to allow for a swift response. All of these would be organised at the start of any project, never mind one as complex as this, by a competent and efficient IT department. 

There are any number of roles that would have secured the proficiency of Jurassic Park, and with far fewer casualties (both human and financial), if there had only been the necessary IT, software and networking specialists in place. 

Do you think you could have saved Jurassic Park? Register your interest to see which roles in the tech sector you could move into!

 

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