Raise your defences

Now more than ever it’s critical to take proactive steps to protect your organisation – and its profitability – from the scourge of network downtime.

The current economic slump has capped your operating expenditure, but not your performance targets. Your mandate - cut your budgets, keep clients happy, target new business... How do you manage? How can you address the current economic challenges without compromising on other core responsibilities?

The recent economic downturn has brought a host of new challenges to bear on today's IT organisation. There is pressure on all companies and especially financial services organisations to reduce operating expenditure and CIOs are faced with the challenge of squeezing the most out of rapidly shrinking IT budgets. In the midst of a downturn, it is natural for companies to change their emphasis and shift more of their resources to focus on the crisis at hand. Battle-worn executives may be tempted to place less focus on issues such as network support. However decision-makers need to be aware that taking their eye off the service levels is something they do at their peril.

Today, IT's role in the business is critical vital. It may be viewed as "the plumbing" - but without it, many businesses would grind to a halt. Now more than ever, networks no longer merely support the business - networks drive the business. If the network is down, so is your business. Seemingly small slip-ups can bring a system down, and in today's competitive marketplace, outages can be extraordinarily expensive in terms of business productivity and damaged client confidence. Downtime equates to wasted productivity, lost sales, user frustration and more, none of which you can afford during lean times. The challenge is to find ways to trim costs without impacting the operating ability of the business.

So what steps can you take to reduce operating expenditure while maintaining the current level of service your clients expect? Making hasty cuts in the short term can result in irreparable damage to the business in the medium and long term. It's a critical balance to manage. Now more than ever it's essential to keep existing clients and at least maintain current business, if not grow it, while working to bring new clients to the business. Opting into a support and managed services contract is one tactic to consider. Organisations should take a long hard look at the role of their IT department and pinpoint those functions that are core to their business and that best utilise the skills of their internal IT teams. The fact is that IT support services are often labour and time intensive and often require highly skilled and scarce resources. At the same they are often critical to the running of a business and network downtime is not an option. Often outsourcing these services to a third party can reduce the monthly operating costs to a business and a single predictable monthly payment can be seen as a real benefit in this current climate.

How do you go about identifying which IT services to outsource? The first step is to take an end-to-end view of your entire IT estate. It's possible that there will be some areas that you consider your area of core competence or 'point of differentiation' that you wish to keep complete control over. Others you possibly won't. Maintenance or 'break-fix' of equipment on the network is often seen as a 'standard' area to outsource. Organisations often couple Maintenance contracts with regular network infrastructure assessment services, which gives them peace of mind that their networks are operational, that they have visibility of any technology that is End of Life or End of Service and that the impact thereof has been assessed.

At this time, you may be tempted to "sweat assets" to avoid any capital expenditure. However, it's important that you establish which assets can be sweated - and where your risk lies. Safeguarding your organisation against downtime requires that you maintain your infrastructure at recommended levels and deploy security best practice features. If you lack the resources required to investigate, scope, plan and execute upgrades and feature configuration and deployment, it may be worth investing in a secure network infrastructure assessment. This service can help you understand what you have and what is putting you at risk. By discovering, cataloguing and providing remediation recommendations for your hardware and software, secure network infrastructure assessments help you to keep your products up to date and assist you to align your estate to configuration, security and patch management best practices. When you understand the risk - you can prioritise your action plans.

What criteria should organisations consider when evaluating potential outsource partners for network support? Again, the first step is to take a good hard look at your business and existing IT estate and evaluate potential partners according to how well their capabilities map to your requirements. Do you need multi-national support? Does your estate comprise single or multi-vendor technology? Do you need a provider that has strong connections with technology vendors? What level of geographic coverage for field engineers to fix problems do you require?  Naturally, the qualifications and experience of staff are also key considerations.

Many of Dimension Data's clients are opting into our global IT support service called Uptime Powered by Cisco Services, which is a joint offering between Dimension Data and Cisco. The reason this support solution is proving to be so popular is that it gives companies a global IT support service backed by the commitment of both companies. Should there be a network outage, the client has a single point of contact and accountability until the incident is resolved - a Dimension Data Global Service Centre The Centre will escalate incidents, if necessary, to the Cisco technical team - so the service is backed by Cisco assurance and technical expertise. Once the fault is diagnosed, it will be fixed and if necessary, an engineer will be sent to site as per the agreed Service Level Agreement or within a time frame agreed by the client that is flexible enough to suit the priority of the situation. Faster restoration time is also enabled by the fact that incidents escalated by Dimension Data are prioritised by Cisco.

As with any partnership, forging a successful relationship with an outsource provider involves an element of trust. To achieve this, bear in mind the following: Firstly, it's important to ensure that your outsource partner understands your business objectives and is clear about what you will be using to evaluate the success of the engagement. Organisations should also be mindful to look at the service delivered as a whole - not just the price tag. In the current climate it's very easy just to focus on the figure. However, the impact of downtime is likely to be more costly than the support service provided. By all means, work with your provider to develop a costing model that works for both parties, but remember that when it comes something as business-critical as your network, you don't want to be confronted by the truism "You get what you pay for".