Roadmap to Application Resiliency

With technology as the core to business operations and critical to competitive advantage, enterprises cannot afford to underestimate the importance of application resiliency for mission critical applications. The cost of downtime or degradation in high profile and high cost applications has a direct and lasting impact on the cost of service delivery of many global companies.

Improving the quality of application infrastructures is essential to organizations trying to meet current and projected business needs while minimizing costs and reducing risk. This overview examines the resiliency of application infrastructures from a life cycle approach, to ensure that stability, security, scalability and sound management disciplines are built into the application and sustained throughout its life.

Applications resiliency improves the processes, technologies, resources and reporting associated critical business applications in order to minimize risk and maximize application effectiveness.

Pre-Production Applications

Companies need to manage risk and improve alignment to reduce vulnerability and enable improved mapping to business needs for pre-production applications. A mechanism is necessary to report on risk, impact, and adequacy of application infrastructure, management and controls to ensure that the launch of a new mission critical application will be successful.

Application modeling tools are not designed to optimize the performance or reliability of new business applications but instead focus on isolated, siloed network or systems resources. Yet to improve service quality clients must manage critical business applications end-to-end and need to understand the big picture behind applications performance and reliability.

It is essential to create an IT risk questionnaire to determine levels of risk that organizations face while managing IT in support of the applications, creating a risk scorecard. It is also useful to report on the alignment of applications manageability to the business. As part of a detailed analysis, a prioritized list of action items focused on making the application infrastructure more resilient should be produced as well. The following areas should be examined:

Risk Recommendations

• Recommended application controls to improve compliance
• Recommendations around application alignment
• Identification of risk in application management processes or use of technology

Performance Recommendations

• Application testing and management technology, tools and process recommendations
• Enterprise management software recommendations (Remedy, Mercury, BMC, others)
• Suggestions around performance, redundancy, availability and scalability (tools, procedures, policies, standards)

Process improvements

• Detailed process maps to identify business processes in need of improved performance, availability and reliability
  management
• Recommended improvements for improvements to ITIL disciplines·
• Configuration recommendations
• Change management policies, processes and improvements
• Improvements to asset management function

Operations Improvements

• Identification of operations improvements to reduce downtime or resolve performance problems - tools, data center
  consolidation, others
• IT root cause analysis to isolate and source errors
• Hardening of IT operations, applications, systems and networked infrastructure
• Improvements to operations, automated ops and incident handling

Support Improvements

• Improvements to problem management and incident management tools, policies and staffing
• Recommendations around help desk staffing, reporting, configuration and escalation
• Improved problem resolution time
• Recommendations around self service and quality improvements

Stabilize IT Infrastructure

Application owners typically find that applications perform well enough in the current environment but are sensitive to any
change or disruptions – they are not resilient. Applications often cannot meet evolving business requirements, global reach,
increased volume, or new regulations. Alternatively, the applications may be supported and maintained in an archaic way that
is not compatible with other solutions. Layers upon layers of legacy applications software or management practices create a
chaotic applications environment that is difficult to manage.

When clients ultimately experience a disruption with a particular business application, the cause of the problem may be
opaque and difficult to diagnose. IT managers need visibility into the health of applications and the underlying IT infrastructure
in order to identify the source of a business disruption and to plot a course of action.

Organizations should evaluate and improve IT infrastructure management in support of the application using an end-to-end
holistic perspective covering network, systems, and database management in support of critical business applications.

Evaluation of the current network and systems infrastructure in terms of its ability to support the application and examining
baseline performance is essential. Next, assess the performance and capacity limitations of the application, and its ability to
scale. Look at integrity and potentials for disruption. Ultimately, companies require insight on problem and incident
management, change and configuration management and asset management to improve daily management capabilities and
costs. The key is to develop an IT roadmap to achieve your target applications management state and develop technologies,
tools, structure and reporting mechanisms to support this objective.

Acumen Solutions Resilience

Rampant IT budget cutting practices forced sound application management practices to be back-burnered and applications
resiliency took a back seat during tough economic times. As a result, today’s organizations need help in improving applications
resiliency. These are times characterized by cyber threats, terrorism, environmental disruptions, complexity of global markets,
and rigorous regulations – times when businesses cannot afford applications to be anything less than reliable. To remain
competitive businesses will be forced to address resiliency.

After the diagnosis and roadmap is complete, companies must plan, deploy and customize applications management solutions to reduce application performance delays, improve uptime, strengthen scalability, improve quality and integrity, source errors, reduce incidents and better manage change. These solutions often involve third party software such as Aprisma, Tivoli, Remedy, SMARTS, Micromuse, Netscout, Mercury, CA, others.

In addition, heavily policy-based solutions should be deployed around applications costs and asset management, problem
management and service management using tools such as Remedy, Patrol, Service Center, Tivoli and others. Recommended
best practices should always be followed.

Overall Benefits

• Reduce costs and improve ROI
• Optimize service levels
• Minimize risks associated with deploying new / upgraded applications
• Improve applications support
• Reduce likelihood of unresolved problems
• Reduce security threats that could impact applications
• Improve problem, asset, change and configuration management of applications

Improved Controls

• Provide increased control and reduced application risks
• Improve compliance
• Minimize risks that application stakeholders will face threats
• Proactively address risks and threats before they occur

Economics

• Reduce downtime
• Minimize costs associated with poor applications performance
• Improve the management of IT assets in support of the applications
• Reduce costs attributed to inadequate problem, change or other ITIL management disciplines

Business Strategy

• Establish appropriate plans to support current and planned business growth
• Support service requirements of clients and other stakeholders
• Plan appropriately for new business applications or growth