The Zero Outage Industry Standard association reports that IBM has joined the association as a founding member. The aim is to provide a common framework for IT quality with a focus on platforms, people, processes and security.
Over the next few weeks, all partners will collaborate to specify new guidelines for the industry standard which will be published on the association’s website zero-outage.com.
Bernhard J Klingenberg, CTO, IBM Resiliency Services said: “In today’s digitised world, ‘always-on’ services and solutions are paramount for IBM clients and customers. IBM has a proud tradition of supporting open source communities and industry collaborations, and always strives to serve our clients’ interests in an integrated and unified way. We are honoured to contribute our experience as a leading services integrator to this new standard with the Zero Outage Industry Standard Association to encourage the continued availability and reliability of IT infrastructures today and in the future.”
During the association’s first board of directors meeting on November 25, 2016, Stephan Kasulke, SVP global Quality at T-Systems International was elected as new chairman of the board of directors for the Zero Outage Industry Standard association.
He explains: “As an organisation’s IT infrastructure can involve a complex ecosystem of technologies from a variety of vendors, there are often differing levels of service level agreements in place which can lead to critical defaults and security issues. I am very enthusiastic to be the first chairman of the Zero Outage Association – this is the start of a long journey towards a stable telecommunications, IT and IoT.”
Digitisation is in full swing: machines communicate with each other, processes are becoming more and more efficient and automation is an integral part of the process. But all can only work if the IT behind it runs smoothly. A failure, even for a few minutes, can have fatal consequences. If production bands are stopped due to IT problems, companies are threatened with image losses and costs of millions.
If systems fail in the airport tower or in hospitals in the worst case scenario, human life is threatened. No matter how big a company is or which industry it belongs to, a reliable and smoothly functioning of information and communication technology is important. Therefore quality is becoming a decisive competitive factor in the age of digitalisation. According to Gartner, the average CIO is already spending 18% of the organisation’s budget in support of digitalisation, with that number expected to increase to 28% by 2018.
Zero Outage Industry Standard is an association based in London, United Kingdom. Founding members include well-known IT sector companies: Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., EMC Corporation, Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), IBM Corporation, NetApp, Inc., SAP SE, SUSE PLC and T-Systems International GmbH.
The Zero Outage industry standard association is providing a framework of best practices and standards to enable the delivery of secure, reliable and highly available end-to-end IT services and solutions. The goal is to develop a common standard for IT processes, platforms, people and security to safeguard quality and reliability at all levels.
Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @IoTNow_ OR @jcIoTnow
