All about IT Governance

As business evolves through standard growth, mergers or acquisitions, organization could find itself trying to manage and maintain multiple, redundant data centers.

The agenda for Data Center Consolidation (DCC) could be to

• centralize your systems,
• Reduce power and cooling costs and protect your environment by implementing comprehensive security
• business continuity and availability plans.
• Eliminate IT redundancies
• Increase IT asset utilization
• Reduce management and operational costs
• Achieve greater return on investments

Typically DCC projects is sponsored by core-IT management. DCC projects are run as a program than a project as it involves cross-IT and business owners accross.

Every DCC program has many unique challenges. Hence getting the scope of the DCC should be defined and agreed-upon. Also identifying and obtaining sign-off to what is not done is equally important. A top level presenattion to the management about - Basics (What we do and what we dont do, Strategies followed, High level steps in moving), Process, Budget and time line should be able to help management understand clearly the direction and would help them approve the budget.

Click here to see a presentation of DCC run as a program

I remember somebody asking me, why is there such a big fuss about program management - why is it so important?

Here is my response: Lets say, I have diabetes and I would like to lead a structured and sustainable life - exercise every day, eat small portions and more often, take medications,  avoid bruises etc. The keywords ‘Sustainable’ and ‘Structured’ is what makes a set of tasks ‘Program’.

The program should have objectives, plans, timelines and should be measurable.  Example Programs would be SOX program, DR Program, Outsource Management Program, IT Service delivery program etc.

What makes these a program? They all require a methodology to ’sustain’ the tasks/processes involved.

Recently, I am observing a new trend of running a Business Continuity programs where BIA is completely skipped. Performing BIA from start to finish is expensive and often intangible.  Reason being, BIA, in my opinion is more of a bottom-up approach of analyzing the potential impacts and figuring out the qualitative or quantitative losses.

Rather a different approach is ‘top-down’ approach where business process owners decide where and when is IT needed the most. For example, Dell.com will need Order-to-cash business process at the minimal and maybe customer service also depending on the budget availability. Clearly, this is a top-down approach as against performing BIA and the value offered here, although intangible it is, helps ‘carve out’ areas of the IT ecosystem for focusing with budget and resources to keep the continuity.

In my opinion, focusing the Business continuity program on objectives is a better investment than BIA.

If you hold your client’s classified or sensitive data as part of performing business with your client, you may want to get an ISO 27001 to offer ’security’ comfort to your clients. Get it?

Here is an example, if you hapenned to hold your clients’ source code or similar sensitive data as part of performing your business, your client will be concerned about the security of their sensitive data -  specifically, they would like to know if your Information security department is reliable and sustainable.  That is where ISO 27001 comes in. Not all companies benefit from ISO 27001. Right?

What does ISO 27001 offer that is different from what you have today? It is a measuring Framework. Framework which enables you to scale your policies and handle them appropriately as your grow.

Security policies in companies today are often abstract and gets close to the ‘terms of usage’ policy within a company. However, it is worth exploring an ISO security framework - ISO 27001. This enables you to formally enumerate policies, data classifications and provide an appropriate risk treatment and provide continuity.