Sometimes, events outside of a business’ control impact the bottom line.
Great leaders know not just how to take risks and achieve growth, but how to mitigate them as well. They treat business disruption as both a challenge and an opportunity.
Some organisations must already demonstrate a level of operational resilience in order to comply with banking regulations. It’s likely that similar legislation will eventually apply to numerous other sectors.
Today technology tends to be centre-stage in disruptive events. It’s often seen as a source of risk. But it’s quite possible to transform it into the driving force of business resilience.
By changing the way we deliver technology cutovers and recovery plans, from chaotic to calmly coordinated, IT teams can become proactive managers of operational resilience:
ICEFLO helps implementation teams outperform recovery time objectives, do no harm during cutover events, and respond confidently to new requirements and unexpected external failures.
With accurate timings for every task updated in real time, and ‘red, amber, green’ status for backing out or proceeding at each step, ICEFLO creates a sense of calm and control that builds confidence in operational resilience plans. Iron out issues, minimize the critical path, and incrementally build low-risk runbooks, based on high quality rehearsals and past successes.
At the most basic level, resilience depends on avoiding IT outages. As confidence improves, so does the ability of IT teams to plan ahead and deliver value to the business in the form of deeper resilience planning.
With critical systems protected, the aim of resilience becomes to maximise the customer experience. Implementation teams can work towards achieving capacity on demand, and a S-RTO for non-critical customer-facing systems.
Taken to its logical conclusion, IT leaders take on the duty of protecting the business from marketplace disruptions - proactively delivering new capabilities to outpace competitors and bring services to market, not to mention enabling strategic organisational change.
Achieving the first layer of operational resilience requires:
Regardless of whether your industry is bound to particular disaster recovery practices by regulation (such as financial services legislation), it’s essential to protect customers from service outages.
ICEFLO helps you improve your recovery plan continuously and achieve IT resilience.
Record exact timings, issues and changes throughout rehearsals and real life recovery scenarios, ensuring that the best possible lessons can be learnt from each event.
Master operational risk management with confident plans for service recovery, partial disaster recovery and full disaster recovery scenarios.
ICEFLO offers accurate timings for each aspect of recovery. Strategically iron out issues that burn up time. Identify and replace the services weighing down the critical path.
By continuously improving disaster recovery plans, outages of critical services can be avoided and customers protected.
Moving away from risk-prone systems can be a daunting task.
ICELO makes an incremental approach possible. The ‘clone’ feature allows cutover teams to take successes from the past and propagate them forwards. Clone and edit specific aspects of previous rehearsals or operations, and over time build extremely low-risk runbooks.
Eventually, run perfect rehearsals, and use them as the basis for Standard Operating Procedures.
Manage the risk of IT disruption. Back out at any time during cutover events, with full awareness of the service delivery risk for each possible course of action.
ICEFLO’s real-time forecasting engine provides your cutover team and stakeholders with accurate, up-to-the-minute instrumentation on the progress of deployments.
IT Leaders can make informed, risk-aware decisions. Input impact tolerances, and ICEFLO continuously calculates both the critical path to complete your deployment, and the critical path for backing out.
Each course of action is assigned a Red, Amber or Green status, along with forecasts of what point in time those statuses will change.
With technical resilience achieved, IT teams can deliver even more value by working to improve their organisation’s financial stability and guard against business disruption:
There are two kinds of threats technical leaders can respond to:
In some sectors, these threats also pose a regulatory risk (for instance, financial regulations).
Serving customers well depends on an effective response to unexpected external failures. That can mean relying less on external service providers, or building a vast array of plans to respond to plausible service failure scenarios.
Bad break-fix contracts with vendors, much like legacy systems, are often risky to escape. Doing nothing can be even more risky. Data leaks, financial disruption, and regulatory risk are all difficult to control when services depend on a third party.
Successful change, without operational disruption, usually requires the participation of vendors.
ICEFLO facilitates evolving past the ‘command and control’ model of collaboration, in favour of building runbook content as a parallel process. By asserting a universal operating model, clarity and detail can be demanded from all parties involved.
When everyone involved in the project uses the same vocabulary, the holistic plan becomes visible. Clash of process and culture can be resolved. With ICEFLO, Complex change can be delivered with confidence, with costs and service delivery risk under control.
At the deepest level, operational resilience is about mounting an effective response not just to information systems failure, but to marketplace changes. The goal is business continuity, in the face of all kinds of disruptive events.
True business resilience is possible only with continuous innovation. Technology must outpace both competitors and customer expectations.
ICEFLO enables significantly faster technology change. More confidence in cutover plans leads to more ‘Go’ decisions, more effective rehearsals and ultimately less time and money spent on each project.
Accurate information about risk, progress and impact of plans creates a sense of calm and control. Backed by evidence, cutover teams become capable of delivering comfort, giving executives confidence to greenlight bigger challenges.
IT teams can become innovation leaders, protecting against not just operational failures and regulatory risk, but all forms of business disruption.
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