Will COOP mean more managed services?
Connecting state and local government leaders
Recent natural disasters have taught a harsh lesson about the possible risks of losing not only a primary data site, but also the people who run it.
Recent natural disasters have taught a harsh lesson about the possible risks of losing not only a primary data site, but also the people who run it. Continuity-of-operations planning requires both redundancy and failover in order to ensure availability of applications and data. But redundancy by definition means purchasing at least two of what agencies may have worked hard to install one of. All the more reason to consider other people's infrastructures when developing a COOP plan for IT operations.
Federal agencies are apparently taking a second look at managed or hosted services.
'There are a number of agencies that are using managed services for disaster recovery,' said Paul Thomas, vice president of managed services and host computing at Computer Sciences Corp., a systems integrator. But the decision to hand over certain IT operations, whether for COOP or not, is not easy.
Government in general has been slower to adopt managed services than the private sector because of security, reliability and control issues. 'It's not something they tend to think about,' said David Neil, vice president at the research firm Gartner Inc. of Stamford, Conn.
'Government agencies have trouble moving out of an environment where they are making the technical decisions,' Thomas added.
To gain government COOP business, managed-service providers typically develop solutions that are less standardized than their typical business offerings. 'The government is interested in continuing to exercise influence over decisions,' Thomas said, adding that CSC accommodates this need by offering hybrid solutions. At some agencies, for example, CSC provides services on government property, or only handles the management piece, leaving the agency to own its systems.
Thomas said government is not as adept as the private sector at accounting for personnel costs, which may lead it to underestimate the benefits of outsourcing its continuity operations. The privacy demands of federal employee unions have also been a disincentive to outsource IT infrastructure, he said.
Security has proved to be an impediment for some agencies. 'Intelligence is not going to want to share their information across any kind of public network,' said Chris Shenefiel, federal solutions manager for Cisco Systems Inc., which sells COOP solutions based on its networking technology. 'Those guys are not going to outsource their continuity. For the average administrative agency, it's definitely an option.'
But Thomas calls the security argument a red herring, noting that corporations with their own secrets to keep (think Coke and its secret formula) have been willing to outsource parts of their networks.
Neil remains skeptical about managed services as a COOP option. 'From a staffing point of view, you're probably going to be better off in a true disaster,' Neil says, 'but in functionality, you're not going to get too much more than [you] would yourself.'
The key, therefore, may be to approach managed and hosted services as a mission-enabling solution first and foremost'a way of cost-effectively meeting an IT need'with COOP benefits as an additional way of making the business case.
Investing in infrastructure
While managed services can include anything from Web site hosting to real-time seat management, the types that matter most in COOP have to do with networking, data backup and application hosting. Yes, outsourcing Web hosting to a third party may ensure a site stays up in an emergency, but depending on the Web site, it may not be mission-critical enough to factor into a COOP plan.
Not surprisingly, major telecommunications companies such as SBC Communications, Sprint and Verizon have programs for managing the network portion of a COOP plan. Among the major vendors of hosted applications are CSC, EDS Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp. and Unisys Corp.
Experts say to look for the following features in a managed-service provider:
- Geographic diversity of sites
- Documented experience with previous disasters
- Physically hardened, redundant data centers
- Service-level agreements that guarantee instant response, not a place in line
- Solid interoperability among sites, including over disparate wired and wireless networks to ensure continuity for first responders
- Continuity and succession plans for its own operations.
David Essex is a freelance technology writer based in Antrim, N.H.