Align IT with the Real End Customer

Your Challenge

Organizations are becoming increasingly focused on the customer and much of this focus places technology at the center. However, the business units feel uncomfortable working with IT for customer-related projects because they don’t believe that IT understands the customer. IT struggles to understand what they should be doing different to support this growing customer-focus.
Often by the time feedback from the customer reaches IT, it has been passed through many layers of the organization, altering the message. This process of passing on feedback is typically slow, delaying changes to customer solutions.
Despite being uniquely positioned across the organization, IT is generally removed from decisions regarding the end customer. IT staff are unsure how to come forth with ideas that could benefit the end customer resulting in many good ideas going unnoticed.

Our advice

Critical Insight

Keep your systems dormant until disaster strikes. Prepare as much of your environment as possible without tapping into compute resources. Enjoy the low at-rest costs, and leverage the reliability of the cloud in your failover.
Avoid failure on the failback! Bringing up your systems in the cloud is a great temporary solution, but an expensive long-term strategy. Make sure you have a plan to get back on premises.
Leverage cloud DR as a start for cloud migration. Cloud DR provides a gateway for broader infrastructure lift and shift to cloud IaaS, but this should only be the first phase of a longer-term roadmap that ends in multi-service hybrid cloud.

Impact and Result

Calculate the cost of your DR solution with a cloud vendor. Test your systems often to build out more accurate budgets and to define failover and failback action plans to increase confidence in your capabilities.
Define “good enough” performance by consulting with the business and setting correct expectations for the recovery state.
Dig deeper into the various flavors of cloud-based DR beyond backup and restore, including pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site recovery. Each of these has unique benefits and challenges when done in the cloud.