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Mission-critical business processes depend on information technology performance from end to end: failures, disruptions and degraded service to end users all take their toll. The consequences are unforgiving. Yet many companies struggle with a piecemeal approach and live with the risk, believing that quality business services with the highest availability are too expensive and labor-intensive. This best-practices guide describes how organizations can protect the availability of business-critical processes while keeping their costs in line. The model is Stratus® Continuous Availability Lifecycle Management (CALM) Services. Developed exclusively for must-not fail environments, the CALM methodology and services derive their effectiveness from our 28 years of experience in continuous availability services and technology. What’s more, recognized industry best practices and governance guidelines - including those defined by ITIL®, COBIT®, Six Sigma® and ISO 9001 - are built into the CALM approach.
Analyze Holistically While Minding the Details A thorough understanding of business needs is a necessary baseline for ensuring the availability of mission-critical services in a successful - and cost-effective - manner. What expectations do line of business managers have? Is the current IT infrastructure performing well against those expectations? How are demands likely to change in the future? Time and money are likely to be misdirected without an updated assessment of these needs. With a grasp on business requirements, it’s time to get down to details. Business processes must be examined, together with how the IT infrastructure and day-to-day operational practices are aligned to support those processes. Service dependencies must be identified as well. A lack of proper alignment virtually guarantees end-user dissatisfaction and excess costs. Under our CALM methodology, the Availability HealthCheck is the specific tool Stratus uses to begin the assessment. Our availability experts conduct a business analysis and assess your IT infrastructure’s ability to meet service level agreements. We review infrastructure integrity to validate that the appropriate environment is in place to deliver the desired service to users, recommending remediation where necessary. Disaster recovery and business continuity are among the top concerns that emerge when we conduct the Availability HealthCheck for clients. Preparing the justification needed to gain management approval for investing in DR and BC protection can be a time-consuming exercise, however. Stratus is prepared to help. Our experience in continuous availability gives us the know-how to prepare a customized business impact analysis that projects specifically what unplanned downtime could cost your business. Another priority is meeting government and industry mandates, with an audit trail that allows compliance to be documented for external authorities. Regulations and guidelines that call for stronger IT governance and security measures have continued to multiply in recent years, including CFR 21 (pharmaceuticals), PCI (credit card processing), HIPAA (healthcare) and Sarbanes-Oxley (public companies). By assessing critical business processes and the IT that supports them, Stratus CALM Services personnel are able to pinpoint areas that call for remediation and testing.
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