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Service-continuity goals important: by following the guidelines of ITIL, organizations can help meet their objectives

Communications News, Oct, 2004 by Malcolm Fry

With the threats to disrupt IT service growing daily, and the impact of those threats on the business also increasing as more critical business processes are computerized, ensuring IT service-continuity management has become strategically important. No longer does service-continuity management involve only disaster recovery, it also involves the impact that technology failures can have on the business.

For example, if more than 90% of your business comes from the Internet, any failure in the IT infrastructure that supplies these services will be high-lighted immediately and could cause lost revenue and impact your company's reputation. Consequently, understanding the goals for IT service-continuity management is fundamental to supporting the business.

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According to the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), the goal for IT service-continuity management (ITSCM) is to support the overall business-continuity management process by ensuring that the required IT technical and services facilities (including computer systems, networks, applications, telecommunications, technical support and service desk) can be recovered within required, and agreed, business time frames. The implications of failing to meet the various elements can have disastrous effects.

First developed in the late 1980s by a branch of the British government, ITIL is an integrated set of guidelines and common terminology for service management best practices. ITIL describes best practices, providing guidance on steps to take and processes or workflows that have proven successful in the past. ITIL leaves organizations to implement the work-level procedures for daily service delivery and support activities that match their unique requirements.

By following the guidelines of ITIL, organizations can help meet their IT service-continuity management objectives. ITIL is becoming the de facto industry-standard framework for providing guidance specific to IT service delivery and support processes.

ITIL recommends that organizations perform business-continuity management practices be cause there are many risks that cannot be controlled by IT. For example, IT cannot ensure secure access to remote locations where IT does not own the premises. What happens if the building burns down? IT is only part of the recovery team.

Does your organization have business-continuity management? If not, then to even approach meeting this goal element, IT must take the initiative to ensure that the organization is aware of the need for business-continuity management, and also to ensure that IT has excellent business-recovery plans in place. All IT infrastructure elements and their associated activities are part of IT service-continuity management.

Service-level management has a part to play here. Along with IT service-continuity management, service-level management is responsible for working with business customers first to identify the IT technical and service facilities that need to be recovered and the required time scales, and then to agree on those time scales with the business customers. Do you meet regularly with your customers to review business-continuity requirements and targets? Do you document and publish those requirements and targets? If you are not performing these activities, then you are not only missing this goal element, but also are jeopardizing the future of your organization.

The critical words in this element are "can be recovered," because there is no point having understanding and agreement without having the recovery processes and actions in place. This element requires that recovery actions, plans and processes be put in place to provide the levels of recovery required by the business community. Of course, this is subject to investment and all other normal business implications.

When considering IT service-continuity management, keep in mind where the stakeholders fit into the scheme of things. If you do not provide this continuity, then you could be perceived as failing to protect your stakeholders' investments. That reflects poorly on senior IT management, especially if there is a critical business-continuity failure on an IT infrastructure component.

For more information from Remedy: www.rsleads.com/410cn-252

Malcolm Fry is an independent executive advisor for Remedy, a BMC Software company in Sunnyvale, Calif. Please send comments to guest@comnews.com

Technology Industry

Service-continuity goals important: by following the guidelines of ITIL, organizations can help meet their objectives

Communications News, Oct, 2004 by Malcolm Fry

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