International Information Control

With the prevalence of 24/7 customer service delivery, business continuity and availability (BC&A) has evolved rapidly from traditional disaster recovery to the provision of highly sophisticated tools to enable effective management with minimal interruption to key services. From ensuring excellent customer service to enabling regulatory compliance, BC&A has become a core component of operational strategy, according to recent research undertaken by HP.

As one Chief Operating Officer explains, “Service Continuity and Availability is something we take very seriously.” However, the distributed nature of many organisations is adding to the level of operational risk. A Treasury Director adds: “Service Availability is vital for us. We have global customers; we have a very mixed institution. It is important for us to keep things running 24/7 without interruption.”

Organisations need to provide users with real-time access to a breadth of customer information, while ensuring customers themselves have continually available access via their preferred channel, be that online, phone or branch. Organisations need to guarantee that management information and compliance reporting are robust and unlikely to be compromised in the event of an incident.

Yet while business managers are adamant that BC&A is key to maintaining customer service, boosting revenues and ensuring business longevity, according to the research, few have any real understanding about just how their information resources are being managed. Where is information being stored? Is it replicated – if so, where? Within the building or at a separate data site? Is it being geographically clustered across sites in different countries to leverage existing investments? These are questions every business manager should really know the answers to, but this is clearly not the case at present.

While many business managers believe this is an IT issue – and less than 50 percent of the respondents take any proactive interest in defining business continuity and availability policies and processes – does this mean they have no expectation for customer data being available to the business? Of course, the answer is no, yet there is a worrying complacency evident in the business managers’ laissez-faire attitude.

Without input into the data storage strategy, can business managers really retain a confident view that key information will be available in a ‘business not as usual’ situation? The policies that determine where information is stored and managed, and whether it is replicated or not, are key decisions that will affect the continuity of customer service.

In addition, as organisations move towards operating both around the clock and around the globe in order to compete, the importance of an enterprise-wide storage strategy increases, to ensure that critical information is permanently available throughout the business. As well as supporting the delivery of exemplary customer service, taking an enterprise-wide approach to storage supports the implementation of best practice throughout the organisation using standardised policies and processes. This in turn can substantially reduce the risk involved in significant change-management projects, for example in the case of a merger or acquisition.

If the business has not set expectations of what information services are important and how soon they should be available should a problem occur, how can IT develop a cost effective storage strategy? Business managers need to take a far more proactive attitude towards information management and control. Without that level of insight, it is highly unlikely that IT’s storage decisions will reflect the business needs.

Storage technologies today offer real opportunities to minimise risk and improve service quality. However, organisations should strive to avoid an ad-hoc approach to increasing storage demands, as a fragmented storage platform is inherently more challenging to keep available 24/7. And of course, in the long term, a fragmented approach is far less cost effective.

Once business managers have seriously considered their service continuity needs, IT and business managers need to work together, potentially utilising expert external resources, to develop an integrated storage policy. Implementation of this policy should fully support the needs of the business, and deliver the exceptional levels of business continuity and availability required to succeed in today’s hyper-competitive economic environment.