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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
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