Unplug…at Your Own Risk

Design Editorial

Tuesday, 19 June 2007 23:00

Written by Carlos A. Cruz & Marc Grove

“It’s just supposed to work.  All the time and every time I need it.  My data and applications should always be at my fingertips.”  –EVP of Operations, Trillium Client

Imagine that you are in charge of unplugging, moving, upgrading or restoring the servers on which the businesses core applications and data reside…all while maintaining seamless and uninterrupted technology and data services to your business or your business clients. 

Palms sweaty yet? 

What would happen if the business couldn’t find and fulfill orders?  If you lost access to receivables?  If you couldn’t pay your employees?  If sensitive HR, financial or client data became exposed to outsiders?  If you could not send or receive an email or a phone call?

How’s that migraine doing?

In today’s “real time” world, instant access to core applications and data is essential to keep competition at bay and to meet the ever increasing demands of your customers.  Transitioning your IT environment can be tricky business.  The moving, upgrading, or restoring of the technology infrastructure you have come to rely on can expose you and your customers to major risks.  Following the right approach can help mitigate those risks.

Assess the situation to mitigate your risks.

A successful IT transition starts with figuring out what you don’t know, and what you need.  The first steps in planning your IT transition begin with comprehensive assessments of business continuity requirements, current and desired IT states.  From this, you can begin building a comprehensive transition plan.

The business continuity assessment allows you to understand what business processes are the priorities of the organization in order to help in the contingency planning stage.  An assessment will facilitate how the move must be staged, sequenced and executed.  If your assessment determines that your organization uses a permitted downtime model, your transition plan will be less stringent. A tightly orchestrated move plan will not be required.  If your organization relies on persistent up-time requirements, your transition plan will likely include multiple backup and redundancy options as well as minute-by-minute, tightly staged, sequenced and orchestrated move plans. 

The current vs. desired assessment, or gap analysis, will help you to understand any technology capability gaps that must be addressed during the upgrade or move (e.g. whether additional processing or storage capacity will be required, servers consolidated, data migrated).  This assessment should also include physical plant requirements.  Among the key physical plant requirements that need to be assessed are physical location, secure access to facility, security of sensitive data, power and backup requirements, fire suppression, controlled environment, and support.

Build a plan and stick to it.

Whether we’re talking about a single server, a server farm, a server room, or an entire data center, the transition plan is the lynch-pin to a successful move and can take from several weeks to several months to develop.  The plan’s focus is on executing the transition in a very short timeframe, often just several hours.  It should include business continuity, communications, resources, vendor management, risk mitigation, contingency, disaster and move-day plans.  Effectively anticipating, identifying, and coordinating the many aspects of the transition plan is key to a successful move.  With environment complexity as the variable factor, a low availability move (up-to 24 hours of systems downtime) can take between 1-6 months to plan.  High availability (no system downtime) can take between 3-18 months to plan.

An effectively built transition plan can also be leveraged to build business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans; important items that often slide down IT Directors’ to-do lists until a crisis event looms or occurs.

Making it happen.

Flipping the switch, or executing a technology transition, is a rare event for most companies.  It should not be expected that the typical IT organization would be staffed or equipped to handle such an event.  Move day can often require coordinating the precise movement of multiple vendors, business units and IT groups.  While some of the project management skill sets utilized are similar to running daily IT operations, the nuances associated with a move along with the speed and precision of execution make IT transitioning a whole different world. 
If an IT transition is in your future and requisite skills and experience are lacking from your resource base, you should consider working with a partner.  The five key things to look for when choosing an IT transition partner are:

1)  Extensive experience with data center operations
2)  Extensive experience with data center moves
3)  Strong project leadership in complex, high-stress environments
4)  Strong communication skills to both business and technical audiences
5)  Ability to quickly troubleshoot and hit deadlines

You can avoid the pitfalls that often accompany technology infrastructure moves by knowing what you need to know, assessing where you are and need to be, building the right plans, and executing them with the right people helping you.

ITtransitions:

ITtransitions is a business unit of Trillium Solutions Group, a professional services firm devoted to helping our clients realize more profitable and efficient operations.  ITtransitions provides expertise to assess, plan, facilitate, organize, and structure the movement and/or consolidation of technology infrastructure. We focus squarely on an organization’s technology infrastructure, including data, applications, servers, workstations, network infrastructure, and telecommunications.

ITtransitions drives results by providing solutions and guidance in

- Transition Strategy & Planning
- Transition Design & Engineering
- Transition Management

Our mission is to help you focus on your business- to drive top and bottom line results.  Call us today at 877.5ITtran (877.548.8726) or visit us at www.ittransitions.com to find out how we can deliver results for you.

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