Although standardisation is a buzzword dating back as far as 1996, many organisations have surprisingly not yet jumped on the bandwagon despite the fact that the arguments in favour of it are as compelling today as ever before.
Standardising hardware and software within an organisation offers stability and improves disaster recovery processes. Coupled with best practices, it also offers a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
"Reducing the number of hardware and software brands in an organisation significantly alleviates the need to have a diverse set of specialised in-house technical skills, as well as the need to manage an array of maintenance companies and carry onsite spares. With fewer brands, technical staff also have a greater opportunity to hone their skills on a particular brand, as opposed to scattering their energies and expertise far and wide," says Richard Samson, partner, Technology Services at KPMG Consulting.
In addition, standardisation places customers in an even stronger position to obtain higher quality maintenance and backup support from their suppliers.
That is why KPMG South Africa has standardised on VERITAS Software Backup Exec for its internal requirements. KPMG has a strong focus to standardise on Windows 2000 and has standardised on other off-the-shelf applications from the Office 2000 suite. Samson says his firm`s most mission-critical applications today run on an Oracle database and Windows NT, with which VERITAS products have been closely integrated.
Taking standardisation to the next level, by implementing common procedures, is as important as a commonality of systems, according to Samson. "By standardising backups across the entire organisation, anyone, anywhere, can pick up on a recovery process and see it through to a successful conclusion," he says.
He says a central authority is essential in first, implementing regulation practices and, second, maintaining them. Without a central authority influencing these best practices, they quickly disappear and with them, control of the IT infrastructure. Samson says this is a much-neglected area of IT management.
It also offers IT managers a centralised skills-pool, this in turn allowing a reduction in number of onsite skills. Samson says: "We`re moving progressively to a 24x7 environment where employees at home are dialling in over weekends to submit time sheets and so forth, so we`ve effectively lost that backup window."
Diminishing windows of opportunity, which would otherwise likely see the loss of certain valuable procedures, make it imperative that an organisation implements best practice procedures. "Best practices include checking the backups to ensure they work, and for instance performing a full restore on a monthly basis," says Samson.
Samson suggests that organisations that fail to do this will eventually succumb to loss of data through incomplete backup and restores. "Too many IT managers are under the false impression that they do not require the agents for features such as open file backups. Without these agents, backups are incomplete and attempting to restore data will likely leave the organisation stranded.
"We provide a cradle-to-the-grave e-enabling business solution service through our outsourcing operation. We determine business and IT strategies for customers, implement them and run them on a daily basis if need be. Our experience is that many industrial age clients have poor or no existing IT systems," he says.
Neglecting a seemingly inconsequential detail would not have placed KPMG Consulting in its current market position, where its retinue of services includes consulting on, and implementing and managing the infrastructure of other organisations. "The first thing we want to do in any organisation is standardise the software and hardware. Without a single view of an organisation you lose sight of the critical elements of manageability, rendering all your other efforts useless. Then we move through the infrastructure with a fine-tooth comb, ensuring all the details are in place and the data unexposed to risk," says Samson.
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