\nIT people spend a lot of time and effort to avoid outages. To do so we buy on redundant everything, run backups and test Disaster Recovery (DR) plans, and follow the change control precesses.\n<\/div>\n

\n<\/div>\n

\nI was once in a meeting with an IT infrastructure manager when they explained why they wanted to avoid a repeat of a recent outage. He had been called into a meeting with the company CEO and CFO and was asked straight out, does this outage mean we have a Sarbanes-Oxley compliance problem? For a large company with a significant US presence, this was a very serious issue.\n<\/div>\n

\n<\/div>\n

\nWhat was the outage that that attracted the attention of these senior executives? \n<\/div>\n

\n<\/div>\n

\nTo put in one way, a file server had crashed.\n<\/div>\n

\n<\/div>\n

\nTo put it another, neither the office of the CEO or CFO could access any of their files, including the company\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s annual report, and the CEO\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s update to the market speech. This was on the morning of the market announcement.\n<\/div>\n

\n<\/div>\n

\nThe incident review had revealed that \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\n<\/div>\n

\n<\/div>\n

Backup were kept for only a few months<\/li>\n
Capacity management processes were poor, or not followed<\/li>\n
The DR plan hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been tested for 18 months<\/li>\n
The DR system couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t cope with the production workload<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nRight now many of you are thinking what a bad job the company\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s IT staff had been doing, but the strange thing was that this was a company that took disaster recovery seriously and conducted annual DR tests.\n<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nSo what happened?\n<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nIn my opinion this is a case of misalignment between IT and their users. File shares and home directories were simply not considered critical. After all, in a large company if one person can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t work, there is someone who can cover it. But what if an entire team can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t work? What if your business lost an entire function, like payroll or sales? The department budget is almost always calculated in a spreadsheet before being entered into the company ERP. Those legal documents are written in a word processor before before being uploaded to the company website. And that presentation for your companies biggest customer?\n<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nIt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s easy to say in hindsight that the IT department should have known better, but ultimately there was a gap between the user\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s expectations and what IT was trying to deliver. <\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nA case of IT doing a good job delivering the wrong thing.\n<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
IT people spend a lot of time and effort to avoid outages. To do so we buy on redundant everything, run backups and test Disaster Recovery (DR) plans, and follow the change control precesses. I was once in a meeting with an IT infrastructure manager when they explained why they… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[19,26,25],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/doingtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/doingtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/doingtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doingtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doingtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/doingtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29,"href":"https:\/\/doingtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions\/29"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/doingtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doingtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doingtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}