ITRO® Disciplines: Service Continuity
Key benefits associated with taking an ITRO® Service Continuity / ILM approach include:
- Reduced exposure to significant outages resulting from loss of critical IT services, data, and facilities
- Lowered insurance premiums due to better managed risks
- Reduced disaster recovery costs
- Reduced IT resource costs due to more effective and stable computing environments
- Potential for reduced fines due to continuous operation regulations
- Enhanced working relationship between business and IT
- Improved business organization ability to win business in the marketplace due to continuous service operation and resulting credibility
- Improved response to crisis situations by conducting business with less manual intervention
Why IT Service Continuity?
To succeed in today's service oriented business climate, organizations are under pressure to provide their services without interruption. IT Service Continuity (ITSC) focuses upon an organization's ability to:
- Minimize the potential organization loss resulting from a disruption of IT Services by recovering vital business functions quickly.
- Align IT Service data with the appropriate service continuity infrastructure by understanding IT Service data criticality, business value, and cost of loss
Where ITSC meets Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)
Data and its retention requirements continue to grow at an accelerating rate. Everything a company does generates data to be stored, reported upon, and audited. Originally viewed as just an asset, data is now viewed as a competitive advantage for the business. As a result, it has become critical that IT Service data must be managed more effectively regarding creation, access, protection, location, archival, and deletion. Data creation to deletion involves the life cycle of information currently known as ILM. ILM focuses upon identifying data requirements for availability, performance, recoverability, and retention including data use and location.
IT Service Continuity Plan:
The ITSC Plan is the key output produced by the ITSC process and ties recoverability, data management, and controls together for a given IT Service. The ITSC Plan ensures that a manageable IT Service based restoration approach, that is acceptable to the business, is operational. The main components of an ITSC plan are: Business Impact Analysis; IT Service Level Catalog; Business Service Level Requirements and Objectives; Service Component Map; Data Classification; IT Service Data Management Strategy; Potential Points Of Failure Analysis; and, IT Service Design. IT Service Continuity provides a consistent best practice discipline to develop, maintain, and gradually improve IT Service recoverability. Information Lifecycle Management aligns the business value of IT Service data with a cost effective IT infrastructure. Service Continuity Controls identify weaknesses that could negatively impact an organization
Maryville's IT Service Continuity process flow focuses upon business requirements first before considering continuity design. Taking a data requirements before design approach provides:
- An effective ILM strategy for any IT Service
- An alternative to using a disaster recovery site for high availability IT Services
- An operating solution to an incident that has been escalated and the resolution time will exceed the service agreement
View ITRO Service Continuity Information Sheet (PDF, 385K)
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