The difference between investing in an IT infrastructure and investing in an IT infrastructure that's redundant and reliable is incremental -- and skimping on your network infrastructure to save a few dollars can cost your business big bucks.
Over the more than 20 years he's worked designing, implementing, and supporting IT networks, Charles Nault has seen it all from the best practices to the worst and come to recognize the organizational logjams that often contribute to IT inefficiency. In his book, "Risk Free Technology," Nault outlines both the problems and the no-nonsense solutions to solving the most common IT dilemmas that increase IT risk.
Nault is Founder and Chairman of Atrion Networking Corporation and a leading proponent of IT-as-a-Utility. Nault spoke with bMighty about how small and midsize businesses are even more vulnerable to IT failures than large enterprises and the relatively incremental difference in spending required to substantially mitigate the risk of network downtime.
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bMighty: Why did you write this book?
Charles Nault: What prompted it was going to a company in New England [an incident described in the book] and meeting with the CIO who was also effectively the IT Manager. They had a backroom piled with stuff, a pieced together network without redundancy monitoring. This was a multi-billion dollar company doing business in 13 countries and they had no documentation. As I was walking out -- I'd seen so much of this scenario -- I wondered what the CEO would think if walked into his office and saw this mess. Your entire company is riding on this network and if it collapsed, it would take you weeks to recover.
What I hope to accomplish with this book is to make CEOs aware of just how critical IT is and how they need to understand IT at least from the same perspective that you'd understand accounting or law to talk to your accountant or your lawyer. At the same time, IT managers were telling me that they needed help getting the attention of top-level managers. I hope this helps bridge that gap.
bMighty: Who is the target reader for you book?
Nault: The book is mostly for business owners, the non-technical people. It's totally written from a business perspective with EBITA-type business terminology for CFOs, controllers, and bookkeepers, in language that anyone can understand.
bMighty: Why do you feel many companies today are "bleeding money"? Is this more true for SMBs?
Nault: It's really true of all companies: 3.6% of gross annual revenue is the average loss for downtime. That's for all companies. From my experience over the past 20 years, SMBs tend to go down harder and longer because they lack documentation and personnel. Without documentation and resources, it takes longer to get back up and running. Often owners and managers view IT as a nuisance rather than an expense, but the fact is when you go down, you don't make the time up.
bMighty: Your book is titled "Risk-Free Technology." Can IT ever truly be risk-free?
Nault: It's not possible to be 100% risk free, but it is possible for really strong strategy to keep you as risk free as possible. Achieving five nines [99.999% uptime] is not really worth the money, but if you get to three nines, you're doing pretty good and it's not a big stretch with today's redundancy, virtualization, and self-healing technologies.
bMighty: What are the key steps to moving toward three nines?
Nault: You need to use a basic approach that assess where you are. You're not starting from scratch; you have a network, but do you have redundancy, what's the reliability, and how vulnerable is it? Look at the latest ITIL standards [documentation of best practice for IT Service Management]. Those standards are designed for large enterprise, but they provide a guideline. It's also important to have a technology advisory committee within the company with end users, top technical people, and someone outside the company. And most importantly, someone from senior management with the business sense and clout to move it ahead. Top management very seldom takes leadership role in IT; because they're often unfamiliar with the dialogue and terminology, they shy away from it.
People talk about the importance of aligning business and IT, but if you put "alignment" on top of an ineffective network, you're killing yourself -- costs go up and effectiveness goes down. The key is to make your infrastructure effective and then you can align with business objectives so your revenue goes up and your IT costs go down.
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bMighty: What do you mean when you talk about a "utility-grade network?"
Nault: That's a network that's always there performing to its peak when your users need it. Think about electricity -- that's utility grade, but if it's not there, it's not effective. Your network has got to be there; if it's not, it's as bad as not having electricity.
IT is a spend-spend proposition. You have no choice: you must make the investment and it's not a much bigger investment to make it redundant and secure. Overall downtime costs average 3.6% of annual revenue. There's a worksheet in the book that allows you to compare uptime rates and calculate the weighted costs of downtime per employee per hour. If going from 95% to 99% uptime is a difference of $1 million in costs and you only need to spend $400,000 [to get from 95% to 99%] it's not a hard decision. The challenge is quantifying the cost of downtime because it's not a hard costs, it's lost labor time.
bMighty: Can "cloud computing" relieve companies of having to deal with IT internally?
Nault: It has the potential to shift some of those costs. Cloud computing has its place, but it's going to be a long time before it replaces your server infrastructure. And even if you replace the servers and apps, you still need the network infrastructure to reach the desktop. If your apps are off-site Web connections, the network is even more important.
See more bMighty Q&A's With Business Leaders
Benjamin Tomkins is editor of bMighty.com.
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