Wikipedia outage underlines importance of resilience
Reports of the outage experienced by Wikipedia yesterday highlight the importance of ensuring resilience throughout an organisation, says Keith Tilley, Managing Director UK, SunGard Availability Services
Mr Tilley said: "Not only can downtime cost huge amounts of money in terms of lost business but potentially more seriously in the longer term, it can also reduce the trust and loyalty of customers. In today's 'always-on' culture where information is the lifeblood of an organisation, customers will not hang around if faced with systems and information that are not available; they will simply go to a competitor. For this reason, business leaders need to consider whether they have the capabilities in-house to meet such high levels of customer expectation or whether they should look elsewhere for the skills.
"Ensuring the resilience of existing IT infrastructure can be a laborious, pain-staking and costly task for some IT departments, whose time could be better spent on more strategic priorities. Organisations need to take time to analyse operational risks, identify those areas where external skills and infrastructure are required or would be more effective and find the right outsourcing partner to mitigate these risks. In doing so, they can ensure Information Availability and keep their IT teams focused on strategic projects which will naturally grow the business."
