IBM Global Technology Services
Thought Leadership White Paper

Proactive technical support:
The overlooked essential in business resilience
Combine hardware and software technical support with business continuity and disaster recovery plans

May 2011

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Proactive technical support: The overlooked essential in business resilience

Contents
2 Introduction
4 Addressing risk driven by business, events and data
5 Redefining the requisite elements of business resilience
6 Foundational business continuity for today’s infrastructures 8 Beyond foundational resiliency: transferring risk

In fact, in light of the risks associated with business disruptions in today’s climate, responses to the IBM Global IT Risk Study—
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A programmer’s misplaced forward slash (/) was to blame.4 In another case, a software problem contributed to a rail car fire in a major underground metro system in 2007 when software designed to monitor performance did not detect overheating.5 The 2003 North America blackout was triggered by a local outage that went undetected due to a flaw in the monitoring software.6
Even with these numerous occurrences, effective hardware and software support—while often addressed within the organization—are often not included as part of a comprehensive business resiliency plan; in many cases business continuity is managed in one silo, and hardware and software support in another, hindering cross-infrastructure visibility and leaving the business exposed to risk.
Organizations must be able to answer questions like:
What would happen if a Microsoft Exchange server on which corporate emails are stored were to crash? Are there provisions for server technical support and maintenance, in addition to backup servers?
How long, if at all, would business operations continue if an email server became unavailable?

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What are the provisions for releasing fixes and updates for microcode and business-critical applications, and for ensuring that these are applied at every endpoint where the applications are in use? Security patches can require distribution in near real time. Is the organization prepared to do so?
What is the plan to prevent servers that