Time to align network infrastructure SLAs to your business

So says Colin Bannister, director of Enterprise IT Management Strategy for Computer Associates – making the point that too few organisations think this way and that their IT investments are thus likely to be under-delivering. According to recent research conducted for CA among UK manufacturers and others, although 96% acknowledged that IT directly contributes towards their bottom line, 86% of respondents said they measured IT performance in terms of cost and only 57% said cited SLAs as a KPI. CA insists that manufacturers should be imposing SLAs that consider the needs of the business, are performance-based and delivered in terms the business understands, like IT costs per manufactured item, per delivery, per sale and so on. According to Bannister, it’s all about ensuring that the IT SLAs are aligned to the SLAs of the business in terms of service to its customers. “The key is to work towards the cost of a business transaction,” he says. “IT should look to understand the contribution it makes towards this and start to publish SLAs in terms the business understands.” He argues that our network infrastructures are an essential part of joining up our increasingly complex and automated supply chains. “So it is essential that the performance and design characteristics are aligned to the needs of the business to differentiate themselves, of just to stay competitive,” he says. And that means it is no longer good enough to impose an SLA of 99% uptime on the whole network infrastructure without considering what the needs of the business are across a period. “By analysing the requirement significant savings could be made, especially where the network services are outsourced,” says Bannister. And he adds: “Look at the delivery of service across the infrastructure: it is no good having 99% uptime if the rest of the IT infrastructure has lower levels of availability.” As for how to build these considerations into the network infrastructure SLAs, CA suggests using service catalogues “where SLAs are defined with varying characteristics, for example, 99% SLA costs x, 98% SLA costs x-y, tariffs vary by time of day, etc.”