5 Things IT Can Do to Sustain Business Growth During Business Disruptions

TDS Supports IT Community to Continue Critical Plans to Modernize

In the face of a major disaster, IT must keep critical business systems working to sustain business growth and maintain company productivity.

In addition to making sure that remote-work applications and platforms allow employees to connect amid travel bans, office closures and required work at home, senior IT leaders must ensure that major IT modernization projects continue to progress. Businesses are counting on IT to implement new technology to drive business growth.

It’s not always possible to predict how and when a disaster will strike, however, there are steps CIOs can take to ensure business operations are sustained and key IT initiatives don’t stop in their tracks. We are working with IT leaders across the globe to plan and execute incredibly complex projects.

Our team is offering guidance and leveraging our technology to make sure that IT teams are able to continue to efficiently orchestrate and collaborate, which is so integral to the success of these projects.

We are happy to share some of that guidance with the wider IT community to sustain business growth:

1. Give everyone a platform to communicate and collaborate.

It’s critical to have a central collaboration platform for managing IT projects. Exchanging workplans and spreadsheets via emails, chatting via Slack, or having countless conference call meetings introduce too much inefficiency and risk of missed steps, incomplete data or errors.

Instead, we recommend a platform which provides the IT team – and relevant business/application owners – with a common and complete view of the IT environment. When IT understands the business constraints, requirements, and restrictions, they can better plan and manage change while minimizing impact to business. And when business understands the complexity of IT’s responsibility, it builds trust and an environment of teamwork with everyone working toward the same goal. In this complex environment, information needs to be shared so that teams make better decisions.

2. Be sure you have the ability to easily integrate tools and data.

Most IT organizations have invested in a number of tools focused on the cloud – assessment tools that provide app cost, sizing, and technology assessment data, and transport tools that automate the movement of workloads and applications. These purpose-built tools were not meant to work together, but play a key role when planning a migration or modernization.

We feel that its critical to be able to leverage these investments but also to be able to pull all the data generated into a centralized toolchain for planning cloud or application modernization or migration projects. IT needs a bridge that helps the team use the data from assessment tools to make decisions for automation tools – enabling customers to get more value from their existing investment in tools and skills.

3. Leverage automation to orchestrate the sequence of both human and machine tasks

As workstreams become more complex and include both human and automated tasks, it is increasingly critical that tasks are executed in the right order at the right time. Automation accelerates discrete processes, and orchestration can coordinate tasks and the flow of data across discrete processes. And we recommend that everyone continue to use that same, centralized communication platform, with a holistic view, to track progress in real-time and be able to assign, trouble shoot and sequence tasks visually.

4. Maintain the rigor of tabletop exercises and prepare runbooks to validate plans.

Conducting tabletops gives everyone the confidence that a major IT change will be successful. Whatever tools you use to manage your migration, make sure you include online tabletop exercises so there are no surprises on the big day. It allows everyone who will be involved in the upcoming event to be able to walk through the minute-by-minute execution plan with a fine-toothed comb.

Our migration plans are managed and executed through automated runbooks that controls the sequencing and managing of hundreds and hundreds of interdependent steps. Runbooks can be set to provide estimated task-timing information and estimated durations for tasks and sub-tasks. In this view you can see not only the overall time of all tasks within the move event, but also the “critical path” tasks and how long that string of tasks may take. Task duration and timelines are powerful both before the event and after for making improvements to the process.

5. Have an active, tested Disaster Recovery plan in place.

DR plans should be part of a strategic approach to application and service recovery that aligns with business needs. IT must understand both technical and business requirements for applications, such as dependencies on other assets and technology stacks, as well as criticality to business, SLAs, regulatory compliance requirements, and future business needs for functionality and service delivery.

TDS deploys an application-centric, business-aligned, and repeatable approach to designing, testing, and executing disaster recovery plans. We focus on the critical interdependencies across business, application and infrastructure layers. You need actionable insight into business requirements for application availability and recovery, so IT can map recovery plans with confidence.

To see how TransitionManager solves the biggest challenges IT teams face when trying to understand how apps work across their environment and build recovery plans, sign up to view a short demo: