IT Modernization
IT Modernization
digital transformation as a driver for better customer experience
IT Modernization
Too many businesses are held hostage by their homegrown and legacy solutions and cannot efficiently onboard new partners and new sources of revenue. This limits their ability to scale and grow.
Organizations with the bigger company picture in mind modernize IT systems end-to-end to better achieve goals and compete in today’s business ecosystem. What we mean by “end-to-end” is integrating all inbound and outbound data flows to enable the visibility to effectively track the entire order life cycle, automate workflows, proactively troubleshoot problems, and meet customer SLAs.
In other words, IT Modernization is strategic, not simply tactical. The distinction is important. Tactical changes are incremental and support your current business model and strategies. Strategic changes are transformative and enable new and reengineered business processes that support continually evolving business strategies.
IT Service Management (ITSM) and ITIL
IT service management (ITSM) is a set of policies and practices for implementing, delivering, and managing IT services for end-users in a way that meets the stated needs of end-users and the stated goals of the business. ITSM is a key component of IT Modernization. ITSM is a cohesive approach to designing, delivering, and supporting IT services. ITSM represents cultural and structural transformation. ITSM shifts the view of IT as a technology provider to IT as an essential business partner delivering high-quality services. Additionally, ITSM focuses on the continual improvement in the effectiveness and efficiency in providing those services. IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the predominant body of knowledge and approach to ITSM. ITIL is a descriptive, not perspective, framework and set of ITSM best practices.
The ITIL framework is described below:
ITIL is exhaustive, but an organization’s ITSM program does not need to implement it exhaustively. In other words, Innovative Logics can aid your organization in tailoring and implementing ITIL processes and practices in a sequence and at a scale and pace that “fits” your organization’s unique business needs, requirements, and constraints.
Disaster Recovery Planning
IT disaster recovery planning should follow from and support business continuity planning.
Business Impact Analysis: Identify the areas and functions of the business that are the most critical and enable you to determine how much downtime each of these critical functions could tolerate.
Risk Analysis: Evaluate your risks and consider the overall impact on your business. What financial losses due to missed sales opportunities or disruptions to revenue-generating activities would you incur?
Prioritizing Applications: Not all workloads are equally critical to your business’s ability to maintain operations, depending on how long you could stand to have them be down and how serious the consequences of data loss would be. Separate your systems and applications into three tiers:
Documenting Dependencies: The next step in disaster recovery planning is creating a complete inventory of your hardware and software assets.
Establishing recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives, and recovery consistency objectives: By considering your risk and business impact analyses, you should be able to establish objectives for how long you’d need it to take to bring systems back up, how much data you could stand to use, and how much data corruption or deviation you could tolerate.
Regulatory compliance issues: All data backup and failover systems must be designed to meet the same standards for ensuring data confidentiality and integrity as your primary systems.
Choosing technologies: Nontraditional cloud-based backup solutions or full-scale Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) provide a means to replicate your production environment.
Choosing recovery site locations: Store data somewhere that’s geographically distant enough from your headquarters or office locations that it won’t be affected by the same seismic events, environmental threats, or other hazards as your main site. On the other hand, backups stored offsite always take longer to restore than those located on-premises at the primary site, and network latency can be even greater across longer distances.
Continuous testing and review: Simply put, if your disaster recovery plan has not been tested, it cannot be relied upon. All employees with relevant responsibilities should participate in the disaster recovery test exercise, which may include maintaining operations from the failover site for a period of time.
As your hardware and software assets change over time, you’ll want to be sure that your disaster recovery plan gets updated as well. You’ll want to periodically review and revise the plan on an ongoing basis.