Chapter 2. Understanding Your Business
This chapter includes the following topics:
Defining your business-critical applications Determining total cost of ownership Defining your requirements Prioritizing your applications Methodology
To be successful in today's competitive marketplace, organizations need an advantage, the kind they can get using Internet technology to solve critical business challenges. The modern IT professionals need to be as focused on business goals as they are on the technology. Customer-facing technology solutions have moved IT up the business value chain. The Internet has brought more and more applications into the business-critical space. Emphasis on customer satisfaction has made user availability of business-critical applications more important than system, network, and server availability.
The starting point for defining application requirements is understanding the customer experience. Higher availability of user services is the single most pressing challenge that IT departments face today.
In today's enterprise, applications are caught in the middle between supporting the business and relying on the infrastructure. What you need to do is to take an application view of the world. Taking that one step further, you need to view those applications whose performance is critical to your business models.
Applications considered business critical today include the following:
All currently are, or will need to be, made available to users, customers, and suppliers, including internal audiences, on a 24-hour basis.
The adaptation challenge to meet customer needs concerns all levels of the business, not just IT. Moreover, companies looking to fulfill their IT requirement need an end-to-end solution, one that understands how to manage the wider implications of technology in business.
Therefore, the IT companies that enable businesses to implement IT solutions need to provide more than just technical help and expertise. They must facilitate the integration of IT into the business. In short, the modern IT company has become as much of a strategic business adviser to organizations as accountants, law firms, and traditional management consultants.
This chapter discusses what constitutes a business-critical application, including the impact and criticality to the business model. It begins by discussing the components of the application that are important to the overall business objective.
Then the chapter covers the indirect costs of a network, money spent on system design, installation, administration, and support, along with intangibles such as lost revenue resulting from the failure of mission-critical network functions. After outlining the basis for total cost of ownership (TCO), the chapter goes on to discuss how each new user, application, and peripheral added to or removed from a network affects its TCO.
Having defined business-critical applications from a functional perspective, the chapter discusses aligning the technical requirements covering end-to-end requirements, including which infrastructure is best suited to transporting in the short and long term. It then discusses how to take the business and technical requirements learned in the previous section and begins to plan for application priorities to ensure that as a whole the business objectives are fulfilled.
Finally, the chapter presents guides for creating a customized methodology to assist with aligning the technical parameters with the business requirements, as well as a template to use as a starting point for the definition of a business-critical application.
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