Irony prevailed last
week. I was returning from delivering a
speech in Florida - a review of “marketplace
trends and issues” with senior IT finance directors – when the news of the
undersea cable outage in the Mediterranean made the airwaves. I first learned of the issue by reading press releases from
a few service providers that screamed, “Our services are not affected!”
The ironic part of this
was that I had just spent time with a colleague presenting our observations on the
topic that has risen to the top of the “sourcing agenda” for many
companies. I’ll save the whole list for
another time, but one subject that received considerable discussion was
“business resiliency.”
Don’t be confused with
the sister topics of “disaster recovery” or “redundant operations” or any of
the foregone terms meant to imply that technology outages can be quickly
overcome. The matter of “resiliency”
reaches beyond IT services.
What we’re seeing
elevate within the strategic sourcing agenda is a recognition that network
availability (mainframe uptime, server redundancy, etc.) is nice, but the
essential requirement is continuity of operations. Work must continue to flow
regardless of any threats to the myriad of processes, systems, facilities, work
forces, or countries involved.
A natural disaster,
man-made terrorism, work stoppage, or political unrest, all tend to have the
same formidable effect on global businesses with far-reaching operations. It can
cause work to screech to a halt, or cause serious consideration of sending it
to a more reliable destination.
Those undersea cables in
the Mediterranean? The telecommunications geniuses will tell you
that the traffic that passed through those bundles of fiber optic threads
originated in millions of different locations, and were destined for even more. Such is the nature of our highly interconnected
communications systems.
The news reports
highlighted the impact of the cable outage on India. Some noted that the disruption cost India half its
bandwidth, causing a moderate amount of slowdown in responsiveness. But, in fact, the outage was likely met with
a rapid and automatic re-routing of traffic in ways that were largely unnoticed
by the users. Larger companies with sophisticated backups, including dedicated
services through other carriers, were able to weather the issue seamlessly.
Mark my words … 2008
will find that business resiliency is a far more important consideration when selecting
service providers and processing locations than ever before. Clients will want lower costs, but they will
also weigh the prudence of assured availability in the face of disruptions
somewhere in the ecosystem of service resources.
Comments