Pace of change

BC: A lot of business continuity is based on policy but how well are customers executing? It's all very well telling people what they need to do but how often as an integrator do you go back six months later only to find it isn't happening?

AT: Leather-bound policies look nice on the shelf but that is often as far as it goes and for us that's a frustration. I see a lot of IT managers implementing technology separate to putting proper policies in place. There are others with great policies that are never getting the technology to a point where they can support the recovery objectives they've agreed with the business.

JL: I had a really good example of that recently with a medium-sized company. Even a non-technical person could see the network design was not good but when I asked to see their policies they were able to produce a ream of bound documents. We also have a government agency as a customer that refuses to do testing because they are always too busy. That's business discontinuity.

JS: A policy is only as good as the support it has from the business. IT can build policies until the cows come home but if it isn't seen as critical then it sits on the shelf and isn't implemented.

PD: Policies are often ahead of where reality is but as soon as there is a serious outage the customer will refer to it. They step up to the plate. I can do without my billing system but can I do without my website? Ten years ago people wouldn't care but now they would be mortified because it is their presence in the market. The fact that customers can't get information would be more painful than uploading orders because orders can always be stacked up.

SJ: You can stack them up but the website being down means call centre staff are suddenly dealing with 20 times as many calls. Customers sitting in an automated queue are going to get upset pretty soon and will call a competitor. In this day and age it's all about now.

DB: We want instant gratification, especially with email. If people can't get access to information then your competition steps in. People have to be conscious of that. A policy is by definition a static document but we are talking to our customers about being able to react quickly. Typically, when you do a plan 20 per cent of applications might be considered mission critical and the other 80 per cent won't impact too much if they go down. But what if they are connected to one that is mission critical? There are so many aspects to it and most organisations haven't done it properly. If they want to be able to compete today, and tomorrow, they need to be able to react quickly. If you are in competition, everything needs to be available all of the time. What's more important in an online environment - the provision of information or the ordering system? The answer is both.

PD: It's about emotion. Not being able to place an order is one thing but then customers sitting on hold when they try to call will start to get emotional about it.

SJ: Technology has made everything quicker and customers who were prepared to sit on the phone for half an hour to get a license renewed are not prepared to do that anymore. If a web page doesn't load within eight seconds they will go somewhere else that does. Decisions are being driven by speed.

SE: We are tossing around the benefits of high availability and can easily agree that we all like instant gratification but do we think business continuity is an opportunity? We have done some development work and are running these technologies within our own business. This has shown us different ways of handling our remote business, backup capabilities, bandwidth performance into remote offices and virtualisation. It is our role as an industry to take these technologies and educate people about what they can add to their businesses.

CM: It's huge. A few years ago shared storage was a massive investment, especially under 1000 seats, but 80 per cent of our storage opportunities now have just two SANs. The budget around shared storage is allowing people to get into disaster recovery and put a SAN on another site.

CS: Look at the ability to deliver hosting now. The cost per 100GB is now at a point where it isn't even worthy of a discussion. Having storage hosted in another environment where DR is not their problem is changing things. It's a massive opportunity for us. It's about integrators understanding the individual requirements of customers and offering solutions that fit their business needs.

DB: As vendors we obviously want to let partners customise but within each segments of the market, such as healthcare, there are opportunities to provide out-of-the-box solutions. A customer might buy one server for SQL and others for CRM, Exchange or whatever other applications they are running. That is the traditional model but partners that want to provide full value to their customers will talk to them about virtualisation, sell a SAN and put some services in there. It's about selling as much as it is about need.

CS: There will be portions that can be packaged but each business will still bring its own requirements.