The Choices from many reputable suppliers of IT managed services can appear very much alike. Yet when you have a mission-critical business process whose function must not be interrupted, you know your requirements call for something above and beyond. This paper serves as a field guide to help you identify key characteristics that set a critical managed IT service apart from even highly capable general-purpose offerings.
A White Paper by Stratus Technologies September 2008 What to Look for in Mission-Critical Managed IT Services What's your exposure to losing business capability? Executive Summary The choices from many reputable suppliers of IT managed services can appear very much alike. Yet when you have a mission-critical business process whose function must not be interrupted, you know your requirements call for something above and beyond. This paper serves as a field guide to help you identify key characteristics that set a critical managed IT service apart from even highly capable general-purpose offerings. The discussion begins with a look at the circumstances that call for this special breed of managed service. One or more signature attributes typically identify a mission-critical capability or process that is core to the business: . High volume of transactions . Transactions of a high value or vital nature . Time-sensitive processes . Virtually no tolerance for data loss More than any other characteristic, mission-critical managed IT services are defined by the principle that preserving business capability comes first. Such critical managed services strive to achieve around "five nines" of availability, or 99.999% (less than 5 minutes of downtime) as opposed to conventional managed services that aim for perhaps 99% (87 hours and 36 minutes) of downtime annually. With that perspective in mind, four markers that distinguish mission-critical managed services will be explained: . The importance of the business impact analysis (BIA) in assessing risk and determining appropriate recovery point (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO), business continuity (BC) measures and disaster recovery (DR) protection . A preventive and predictive service design that minimizes costs and exposures identified in the BIA by protecting against failures and exposure, rather than recovering only after the business capability has been adversely affected . Service level agreement (SLA) metrics that put business capability first (percentage of the time the critical business capability or process operates at full performance), followed by availability capability (percentage of the time the business capability functions with its redundancy and failover components intact) . A "Continuity Gene" that flows through team members, who are specialists in the mission-critical domain; work in a do-whatever-it-takes mode; are adaptable to your organization's key business capabilities and processes; and prepared to co-exist with traditional managed service providers
What to Look for in Mission-Critical Managed Services Page 1 When Do You Need Mission-Critical Managed Services? The directive of a mission-critical managed IT service is to make sure an essential business function ? or functions ? will operate how, when and where needed. (As related to IT, a business capability spans the technology, the processes and the people necessary to keep a business function running. Any one business capability may depend on a number of business processes.) Perhaps more than any other single characteristic, mission-critical managed IT services are defined by this guiding principle: Business capability is not everything; but it's the most important thing. All other concerns are secondary to preserving business capability. What types of situations warrant mission-critical managed services? The business capabilities and processes involved will be core to your business. For example, while payroll processing is necessary in all organizations, it's nothing less than a lifeblood function for a payroll-processing service bureau. In contrast, losing access to a general or administrative function for a half an hour may be inconvenient, but your business is still able to continue when such functions are offline or if they operate at reduced capacity on occasion. Therefore these sorts of tasks would not fall under the umbrella of a mission-critical managed service. In Stratus Technologies' almost three decades of providing continuously available servers and services that enable the world's most demanding IT environments, we have observed that mission-critical settings are identifiable by one or more signature attributes. These include high transaction volumes, transactions of a high value or vital nature, time-sensitive processes and virtually no tolerance for data loss. Figure 1: Attrib... [download for more]
