Organisational Readiness

Some questions have to be settled before go live, and the answers belong not only to the technical team but to everyone responsible for business continuity.

Picture a scenario: at 11pm on a Friday the system meets an unexpected spike in traffic. Three things decide what happens next. How does the system absorb that load; does it scale automatically, or is there a fixed capacity ceiling? What happens if a component fails; does a standby system take over automatically, or does the service stop altogether? And if data is lost, how far back can you recover; how often are backups taken?

There is a fourth question that is usually skipped: who picks up the phone on that Friday night? Knowing what the system will do is not enough. Who inside the organisation is informed, who has authority to intervene and who can stop the system if needed all have to be defined in advance.

Saying "nobody knew" during an outage is the most expensive sentence there is. CBOT's enterprise SLA structure, monitoring infrastructure and backup policies exist so that these questions are asked at the start of the project rather than in the middle of an incident.

A common mistake: treating organisational readiness as complete once you have read the vendor's SLA. However resilient the vendor's system is, if it is not defined who inside your organisation is informed when and who decides, everyone looks at each other during an outage. Organisational readiness is your own operational clarity, not the vendor's.