Service availability and resilience: why it needs to start with skills

Service availability and resilience in the data centre context raises issues from a business and operational perspective. Both fall under the overarching theme of customer experience and customer service, and both are equally as important. As an industry, we must deliver the right level of satisfaction in providing such critical services otherwise it’s game over – even if the power, cooling and heating is still running.

 

The ever changing end-user understanding

As the end-user gains a better understanding of what’s required, the skills and competencies of the team running the data centre environment are becoming increasingly more important. Today, customers don’t just look at the shiny new infrastructure and the levels of redundancy built into the design of the data centre fabric and infrastructure. What we’re seeing now is a deeper customer understanding as to how the data centre is managed day-to-day. This has meant that the competencies of the staff have become more important than the age of the building, or the number of generators on-site.

 

I myself am seeing customers ask more and more questions around the ability of the team to deliver consistent, uninterrupted service availability, and the team’s proficiency to use the levels of in-built resilience to provide the right customer experience. Given the growing inquisitiveness, and thus knowledge, of the customer, these capabilities need to be deep enough to maintain the data centre not only over its lifetime, but also beyond the end of a customer’s contract.

 

This shift in customer nature means that industry behaviours will need to adapt in the mission-critical environment to drive beyond satisfactory levels of service availability, and exploit the investment made in resilience. The Internet of Things, hybrid IT, converged services and other technological developments will only continue to define the required behaviours for running mission-critical data centre environments.

 

Evolving customers, evolving skill profiles

The knowledge of the data centre team will need to progress to an even higher level as IT and toolsets continue to become more integrated. As the scope of the data centre continues to evolve, teams will need to think more closely about security requirements, processes, commercial and legal requirements and technical and customer-facing skill requirements. What these factors all have in common is their ability to impact the user experience and customer satisfaction levels as they are all factors that have a daily effect on service availability and levels of resilience.

 

Automation is something else that we are seeing a growing use of. Because of this, understanding and incorporating this into data centre services to maintain service availability and resilience will also be vital. For example, if you have a clustered environment over two data centres, getting to grips with the status of this service will be vital in determining how Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM) is provided. If this understanding isn’t gained, it could risk the end users’ service availability or levels of required or contracted resilience.

 

As an industry, we know that our human behaviours in the data centre environment are the largest threat to service availability and resilience. As a result of this, our behaviours at every intervention in the mission-critical environment need to be maintained at a bare minimum, but also need to evolve and adapt.

 

If we can facilitate collaboration amongst our data centre teams by encouraging the adoption of ISO, and other leading industry certifications such as those from the Uptime Institute, we’ll ensure that we can improve levels of service avaiability to ultimately maintain a high level of resilience. Transparency and competency will only improve customer satisfaction.

 

We’ve come to a crossroads in data centre management, whereby we can continue doing what we have always done, or extend our thinking beyond just the design. By taking the latter route, and demonstrating our capabilities to properly maintain mission-critical environments whilst proving in-depth knowledge and understanding of the impact of evolving and emerging technologies, we will continue to improve customer service to both of our benefits.