How to negotiate DOWNTIME with Business
How to make your business not be mad about the DOWNTIME
“Everything Fails all the time”, to cite Dr Warner Wogles, CTO of Amazon.
DOWNTIME costs MONEY, in both churn and and “lost sales”. As an IT professional, you need to learn how to talk about resiliency and business continuity concepts, such as Disaster Recovery and RPO, in terms your BUSINESS will understand - COST.
Why is there such a gap between Technology and Business?
I think mainly for 2 reasons:
- [1] Historically, Business and Technology didn’t ACTUALLY “work together”. Business treats Technology as a provider… there are cases of big companies who actually EXTERNALIZED Technology.
- [2] Even within IT: Application Developers never cared about the DR, its always been infrastructure and operations responsibility… and fault. Infrastructure teams still think about the Disaster Recovery as a binary concept - “in case of disaster, shift your entire infra to a “second location”. In Cloud all this changes, as resiliency becomes fully configurable, and app and infra “merge” in a single “construct”. FUN!!!
Cloud changes all this. Cloud gives you the Tools, Services and APIs to architect your application for whichever requirements the business needs. The highest quality of a modern Cloud Architect is the ability to negotiate TRADE-OFFS with the stakeholders.
If you want to triumph in todays market, you need to do 2 things:
- Find a way for your Business and Technology to work together as One Team, and establish a “common terminology and understanding”
- Join “Dev” and “Ops” in One Team… a team who gets that DOWNTIME is everyone’s responsibility.
LETS DEEP DIVE!!!
When your application fails, you might lose some data. Imagine you are buying stuff on amazon.com. You have your stuff in your cart, and the app starts failing… minutes later, the session is restored. Is your stuff still in your cart? DEPENDS on the RPO.
RPO determines how many minutes of “data” you lost. RPO = 30 minutes means that while restoring the data, last 30 minutes of transactions were LOST FOREVER. It is therefore understandable that your business will ask for zero data loss. I strongly suggest you to create your own version of the following table, and use it often, when negotiating your IT budget, and the trade-offs. To repeat the most important take-away: The highest quality of a modern Cloud Architect is the ability to negotiate TRADE-OFFS with the stakeholders
Check out the summary video: