Irony prevailed last week. I was returning from delivering a speech in Florida - a review of "marketplace trends and issues" with senior IT finance directors - when the news of the undersea cable outage in the Mediterranean made the airwaves. I first learned of the issue by reading press releases from a few service providers that screamed, "Our services are not affected!"
The ironic part of this was that I had just spent time with a colleague presenting our observations on the topic that has risen to the top of the "sourcing agenda" for many companies. I'll save the whole list for another time, but one subject that received considerable discussion was "business resiliency".
Don't be confused with the sister topics of "disaster recovery" or "redundant operations" or any of the foregone terms meant to imply that technology outages can be quickly overcome. The matter of "resiliency" reaches beyond IT services.
What we're seeing elevate within the strategic sourcing agenda is a recognition that network availability (mainframe uptime, server redundancy, etc.) is nice, but the essential requirement is continuity of operations. Work must continue to flow regardless of any threats to the myriad of processes, systems, facilities, work forces, or countries involved.
A natural disaster, man-made terrorism, work stoppage, or political unrest, all tend to have the same formidable effect on global businesses with far-reaching operations. It can cause work to screech to a halt, or cause serious consideration of sending it to a more reliable destination.
Those undersea cables in
the Mediterranean? The telecommunications geniuses will tell you
that the traffic that passed through those bundles of fiber optic threads
originated in millions of different locations, and were destined for even more. Such is the nature of our highly interconnected
communications systems.
The news reports highlighted the impact of the cable outage on India. Some noted that the disruption cost India half its bandwidth, causing a moderate amount of slowdown in responsiveness. But, in fact, the outage was likely met with a rapid and automatic re-routing of traffic in ways that were largely unnoticed by the users. Larger companies with sophisticated backups, including dedicated services through other carriers, were able to weather the issue seamlessly.
Mark my words … 2008 will find that business resiliency is a far more important consideration when selecting service providers and processing locations than ever before. Clients will want lower costs, but they will also weigh the prudence of assured availability in the face of disruptions somewhere in the ecosystem of service resources.
