Small Business Can Get High Availability From IT

The Importance of Testing

One of the most common problem points is the lack of testing to ensure that the change, upgrade or new application or equipment will not impair operations in any way. “Trust but verify” is key. Validating that the new code or hardware works in a test environment similar to the production one is critical, if there are to be no surprises. Executives should remember that the purpose of the verification exercise is to not just validate that the changes work but that the production systems also still work as expected.

One way to ensure that things have been adequately tested is to have the tests run and approved by the production system administrators who will have to be responsible for and suffer through the outage, should the change fail. By doing this, the staff desirous of making the change will have to document the process and outcomes well enough for operations to confidently use and accept it. No change of any type should go live without going through this process. While it is true that there may be emergency changes that need to be applied immediately, developers have used emergency procedures as a guise to push through changes so that they do not have to go through standard processes. An emergency change procedure (if it exists) needs to require a high-level management sign-off.

Governance is Key

Without governance, best-practice policies and procedures will slowly disappear and faulty “business as usual” operations will return. It is critical that IT management remains involved and ensures processes are fully followed, every outage is investigated to determine the root cause and procedures are updated to fix problems and address any changes.

There are companies whose production systems never go down. Some have not had an outage in years. Some of that is due to highly redundant hardware and software that enables the applications to keep going but on different systems. But the real keys are how the people are trained and the processes they follow. Executives should know that with the right performance plans and incentives, IT staff will work to put in place best practices and then execute them. And this can improve a company’s top and/or bottom lines, productivity and morale.

Other articles by Cal:
Leasing Contracts: Not All Are Equal
15 Reasons it Makes Sense for IT to Lease


Cal Braunstein is lead analyst at Robert Frances Group, which provides advisory, consulting and research services to senior executives in IT and LOB management as well as for marketing/sales management for companies that provide IT and communications services and products.