Don't get 2e2'd: How to survive when your IT supplier goes titsup

IT has come a long way

Obviously, taking all IT and telecoms operations in house is impossible. But IT has come a long way. Did you notice that, in order to increase reliability, car manufacturers have

. reduced the number of parts required to build a car

. standardized these parts accross their range and subsequently

. reduced the number of suppliers?

The same is possible in your datacentre: Reduce the number of different operating systems, applications, middleware and databases, and I guarantee the IT operation will become more transparent, affordable and flexible.

Oh, and while we are on it, the number of datacentres can be reduced, too. Instead of datacentres in the UK, Lithuania, Bangalore, Hong Kong, Manila and Chicago we only need UK and Hong Kong. And you don't need to have a layered approach of multiple suppliers and outsource service providers for all bits and bobs of your operation, you can also train up staff and/or simplify processes, and I've seen the black swan where a company saved money (!) by insourcing (!) and become more flexible as they liberated themselves from a lock in situation with a certain supplier.

Whatever happened to the simple idea that s**t happens

Any supplier could go down the pan at any point and all companies should plan for this.

By all means hope for the best (and maybe even expect it) but don't plan for it.

I sort of thought that was what big league IT management was about.

Expect the unexpected

I'm not going to mention names, I don' t want them to come and get me. I worked for a large utility that had gone to the effort of having two centres, six miles apart, away from known aircraft routes, fault lines, rivers, volcanos, lay lines and crop circles. They then built their billing machines over in the sites, 100% redundancy of everything, right down to power from different grid supply points (we're talking 400,000V network tracing). As a utility, they billed millions a day at sod all margin, so they needed the cash flow to pay suppliers quickly, we used to talk about 10 days without billing means even the banks would stop lending money.

I was a grad given a project to check the business continuity, what was expected to be another pointless exercise they ran every year to keep the useless grads busy for a month. They were in for a shock, a factory that was halfway between our sites and used to process nothing in particular had changed hands, so I wrote to them asking what they did for business contiuity and if we could learn anything, seemed like something to do in my month to write this report.

The start of paragraph two said it all "As a processor of chemicals who have a statutory 10 mile exclusion zone should there be a confirmed leak......"