“You could argue that risk demonstrates a Markov property, meaning that the future states are determined by the present state and are independent of past states. We would argue that risk is cumulative to some degree, perhaps with an exponential decay but still additive. A risky event today can result in failures in the future, either because of direct correlation such as today’s change breaks something else in the future, or via indirect methods such as an increased risk tolerance by the organization leading to riskier behaviors in the future.
Either way, actions can have near and long-term consequences.”
—Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott, The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise.
