Establish business commitments

10 minutes

The first step in creating business alignment is ensuring that everyone uses the same terms. Most likely, the engineers in the IT department don't use the same words as business stakeholders.

Developing a cloud strategy is a perfect opportunity to align these terms and look into commitments between IT and the business. The following three words can help improve the conversation with business stakeholders: criticality, impact, and commitment.

After all teams are aligned on terms, you should document and store that information for easy access.

Criticality

How critical is the workload for the business? If you ask users, most say that their daily workload is the most critical one, but this conversation needs to be held from a business overview perspective.

A company-wide scale for criticality makes sure everyone involved in the conversation means the same thing. The following list is an example of a criticality scale:

Mission-critical: The workload affects the company's mission and might noticeably affect corporate profit-and-loss statements.
Unit-critical: The workload affects the mission of a specific business unit and its profit-and-loss statements.
High: The workload might not affect the company's mission, but affects high-importance processes.
Medium: Impact on processes is likely. Losses are low or immeasurable, but brand damage or upstream losses are possible.
Low: Impact on business processes isn't measurable. No brand damage or upstream losses are likely. Localized impact on a single team is expected.
Unsupported: No business owner, team, or process associated with this workload can justify any investment in the workload's ongoing management.

Some workloads might not be classified as critical, but can be vital indirectly. For example, if a noncritical compliance-management tool goes offline, maintaining business-critical compliance requirements is challenging. It can affect the company's mission in the long term.

A workload can also be critical because the customers who bring the most income use it. Another soft-cost factor can be that the board or CEO is using the workload daily.

Instead of walking through every workload, you can decide on a default criticality (for example, medium) for all workloads. A default criticality makes it easier to identify workloads that need higher or lower criticality classification.

Impact

The business needs to understand what an outage costs. The output of the impact conversation is used to balance investments for cloud management.

The most common metric for impact is impact per hour, meaning operating revenue losses per hour of outage. To estimate impact per hour, you can look into the historical data of a previous outage. Also work with the finance department to determine the best approach to estimate loss per hour. If you can't find any financial data, you can use the percentage of affected customers to measure impact.

Commitment

Documented commitments between the business and IT create a true partnership. All businesses have workloads that are key to the company. If any of these key workloads fail, the entire company is affected. On the other side of the scale, some workloads can be offline for months without any notice. These workloads should be managed in different ways.

Business commitments are about finding the balance between the level of operational management and operating cost. For most workloads, a baseline level is enough. Critical workloads make it easier to justify double management costs because of any business interruption's potential impact.

Management baseline

The first business commitment comes in the form of a promise to deliver a set level of services for operations management. Those services are called a management baseline. Based on the services included in the baseline, central IT can easily calculate a minimum service-level agreement (SLA) that applies to everything deployed to a controlled cloud platform.

Management of higher-impact areas

The second business commitment focuses on what else is needed from operations for various platforms and workloads. Any platform or workload with higher levels of criticality or impact likely needs more than the minimum SLA.