Why Business Impact Modeling Is Important to Your Managed Services

Enterprises today are increasingly reliant upon the network infrastructure to conduct almost every aspect of business. Your customers and end-users depend on the delivery of your services provide to accomplish their business goals and, of course, these services rely on the supporting infrastructure to function.

As an I&O leader, your primary goal is to provide the assurance that the service is available, and then, that the experience of using it is satisfactory.

Business impact (BI) modeling refers to the ability to map services from an end-to-end perspective across the IT infrastructure that delivers the functionality. In other words, the ability to orchestrate the reliance of technology to support a business function, while articulating the dependency of the service upon the underlying infrastructure.

As you know, the infrastructure itself is a complex set of layered technologies. Some elements are based in-house and, more likely than not, there are significant portions hosted on the cloud. Each of these layers has their own set of management systems, and it is not uncommon to have a proliferation of overlapping tools sets to operate the whole shebang.

BI modeling enables IT operations teams to move from an infrastructure-centric perspective to a higher level of abstraction. This enables a service-centric mindset. It shifts the focus away from the nuts-and-bolts of how the equipment is operating and brings visibility into the services that are being delivered by the IT infrastructure.

From a managed services standpoint, BI modeling is an essential capability when it comes to delivering critical services, maximizing their utilization and delivering a superior working experience across the user community.

Prioritization

Because the infrastructure that supports the delivery of business services is vast and complex, there are a multitude of issues that can affect service delivery at any point in time. BI modeling is a very effective way to ascertain not only what needs to be addressed, but in what order.

As an example, there may be two infrastructure elements that are identical. But when they simultaneously face a failure, how does one decide which one to address first? From a criticality perspective, the failure modes are identical, but from a business materiality perspective which is more important?

BI modeling can help you address this quandary. By providing the context around which services and user communities are affected, IT teams can rapidly decide which one is more important from a business perspective and prioritize remediation appropriately.

Planning

BI models provide the context around which business services are dependent and delivered by the various components of the infrastructure. Imagine a situation where a service needs to be ramped up, say to manage an influx of calls for an upcoming event.  The BI context makes it possible to plan around the event in terms of understanding what resiliency and redundancy needs to be in place to mitigate potential risks that might affect service delivery.

Stakeholder Management

I&O leaders are constantly challenged when justifying the cost benefits of infrastructure investments to non-technical decision makers. BI models are fantastic tools when it comes to explaining what exactly an initiative will provide from a business service and end-user perspective. This context makes it possible to craft effective messaging when dealing with non-technical decision makers.

Situational Awareness

Managed services provide a large number of benefits when it comes to running your business. Make sure your Managed Network Services provider understands your business and can provide business impact modeling.

BI is an invaluable tool since it ensures a level of situational awareness that allows you to confidently go about managing business services as well as the supporting delivery infrastructure in an effective and efficient manner.