“Availability” means different things to different people. For many, it connotes maintaining business as usual, or resilience to known or unknown disruptions – the traditional BC/DR mind-set. But in today’s terms, it’s increasingly about IT infrastructure that can perform and adapt at the speed of business. That makes availability a strategic imperative for all organisations – no longer just pure-play internet businesses or low-latency financial trading.
Multiple factors are behind this shift. More organisations than ever are having to meet customer expectations of round-the-clock access to information and services. Mobilisation of the workforce is another driver, as even office-based employees are switching between multiple devices in the course of the day, whether corporate-issue or BYO.
But the single biggest factor is that removing unnecessary time to access information and services can create significant differentiation and revenue uplift.
Consumerisation has driven expectations of gratifyingly quick and simple access to answers or fulfilment that yesterday’s enterprise software often fails to provide. Access to high-speed connectivity and the latest gadgets at home reduces our tolerance for slow networks and ageing, unreliable equipment in the workplace. And a one second delay in page load can cause a 7% drop in conversions, as almost half of consumers expect a page to load in two seconds or less.
The trouble is, when considering availability, organisations tend to limit their definition of IT infrastructure to the traditional, feature-heavy technology elements of the data centre. But this neglects the influence of people and processes on availability – skills and experience that many organisations are hard-pressed to deliver internally. This is where outsourcing can convey tremendous advantage: by putting expertise and resources on tap to support the pursuit of All-Time™ availability.
Frictionless transition
A successful outsource partnership needs to focus on delivering the right solution for the right situation, with the supporting technology platform able to provide twenty-four-seven resilience and availability. But on-boarding is a crucial part of the data centre transformation process, as organisations look to gain experience in migrating application workloads between environments.
Mission-critical applications in particular need to be transferred quickly and seamlessly to avoid business interruption. A combination of consultative support and a migration gateway can help organisations on-board their data into a dedicated environment that acts as a staging post. Once user acceptance testing has been completed, the workload can be moved into production with confidence that demands for reliability and responsiveness will be met.
Compliant operations
All organisations, even those that aren’t in heavily regulated industries, need to maintain compliant operations. For example, any business that handles card payments from customers needs to meet the payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS) or risk severe financial penalties and the right to accept card payments being revoked – unthinkable for any online merchant.
The PCI standard provides an actionable framework for developing a robust security process, from prevention and detection to appropriate incident response, but there’s no such thing as an off-the-shelf PCI-compliant environment. However, a managed service provider should be able to determine and meet a company’s requirements for delivering a best-fit, compliant cardholder data environment – one that reduces complexity and accelerates the identification of and response to security threats.
Data jurisdiction is becoming a more prominent consideration than ever, in light of recent headlines around improper use and mandatory disclosure of information – especially when data is stored in multiple locations or accessible by multiple parties. When it comes to outsourcing, it’s vital to have a definitive picture of where, how and with whom data is stored, processed and shared. And data jurisdiction isn’t just an important checkpoint on the journey to a managed or hosted environment – it’s also crucial to back-up management and the ability to export the data to another third party, or indeed bring it back in-house.
Reduced vulnerability
The subtext of business disruption used to be limited to natural or man-made disasters. But nowadays, derailment is more likely to come from malicious cyber activity. Many commonly-used access control techniques were designed for enterprise data centres and, as such, are poorly suited to third party environments, as processes that were previously behind a firewall are exposed to the internet.
High profile Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have recently been attributable for putting a major high street bank and the Ministry of Justice temporarily out of action. These cyber-assaults produce a flood of traffic that overloads the target organisation’s website and quickly shuts down its operations.
A managed service provider must therefore fully grasp the escalating importance of security on today’s business environment, and help companies bolster their security posture to maintain continuous availability. DDoS mitigation, based on real-time event analysis and reporting, means a response can be mounted against such security threats before they can adversely affect operations.
Availability: not just an IT thing
Until now, availability has been measured in terms of the number and duration of service interruptions, or the percentage of services and infrastructure being monitored.
But to reflect the more intangible nature of availability, organisations need to reduce reliance on traditional IT-driven KPIs and the binary notion of uptime and downtime, in favour of greater focus on business outcomes. That means using broader customer and employee satisfaction metrics, such as Net Promoter Score, to understand how time to information affects performance, and build the business case for availability investment.
That’s because availability is not just an IT project but a continuous improvement process – one that is key to building the foundation for new opportunities, sustainable growth and unwavering brand loyalty.