- Mission critical systems directly and significantly impact revenue, goodwill, health & safety, or regulatory compliance, and therefore demand a higher level of attention than non-critical production systems.
- Organizations with limited IT budgets are struggling to meet the availability and reliability demands for mission critical systems.
- Worse yet, spending is often not optimally allocated, leaving organizations at more risk than they should be.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Providing high availability for mission critical systems is costly. Therefore, a greater emphasis needs to be placed on first determining which business functions are truly mission critical, and then scoping the business requirements for reliability and availability — before designing the infrastructure to meet those requirements.
- System failures are more often a people or process issue than a technology issue, so organizations need to address all three areas. Simply purchasing more-advanced hardware and software will not deliver 4 or 5 x 9 availability.
- Similarly, IT managers need to consider the full end-to-end infrastructure, including power, cooling, networks, message queues, and so on. Focusing only on server or database redundancy is not good enough.
Impact and Result
- Identify which systems truly are mission critical, and their dependencies.
- Take steps to minimize or prevent human error.
- Establish policies and procedures for mission critical systems.
- Create a technology plan that identifies areas of risk and prioritizes investments accordingly.