Incidents happen, and it is not always possible to prevent them. As our customers’ infrastructures grow in scale and complexity, challenges can be inevitable.
Sometimes these challenges are minimal and can be resolved within the same business team. Others can become much more complex and trigger an escalation process, resulting in the challenge being perceived as affecting vital company functions, thus needing urgent attention.
Incidents are also a learning opportunity. Discovering vulnerabilities in your environment, analysing incidents or repeated problems, and evaluating resolution times, are strategic factors for teams at Dell Technologies. Our teams’ assessment of situations allows us to guide customers in planning maintenance activities.
One of the responsibilities of Service Account Managers is the management of critical events arising from technical issues, resulting in successful incident resolutions by focusing on customer satisfaction.
The first thing I do in these cases is to engage with the customer to precisely define the severity level of the problem, collect specific information on the impact and nature of the situation, and align the appropriate resources in order to accelerate the results according to the needs or circumstances.
The SAM will therefore act as a point of reference and will work closely with the customer, with all the technical support areas and team members involved, providing continuous updates both internally and externally and actively monitoring the progress of the resolution. Particular attention is given to the customers’ ability to quickly resume normal business operations, minimising the impact.
SAMs also review the incident during highly critical situations. Within this review, the SAM brings together the resources involved in the management of the incident to discuss the details: the causes, the impact, the actions taken to mitigate and resolve it, including suggestions and recommendations for both Dell Technologies and the customer.
The recommendations highlight potential causes of risk for the customer’s infrastructure and, consequently, implement the necessary corrective actions to safeguard business continuity. Furthermore, it allows to identify any gaps and suggest technological propositions for prevention. Therefore, a SAM can advise on transforming unexpected events into opportunities.
Driving our customers in their digital transformation process by strengthening mutual trust and partnership is one of the main objectives of Dell Technologies for the present and the future.
One of the proactive activities of the SAM role is, in fact, to discuss the outcomes of the review with the customer and the stakeholders. During this review suggestions are recommended to prevent the recurrence of a particular issue and maintain system performance when an unplanned outage occurs.
One of my customers with rapidly expanding business, after a critical event with a big impact on business functions, has planned the adoption of a Disaster Recovery site based upon such review.
This enabled the client to expand its infrastructure to ensure business continuity. Moreover, the assessment of the costs, required to restore operations, has determined the cost-effectiveness of the investment made to prevent such high-impact events.
For its vital business functions, Dell Technologies’ customers should have a business continuity management (BCM) in place. The integrated disaster recovery plan should also be fully tested and ready to execute if a disaster or unplanned outage occurs. A typical plan involves recovering applications and the associated data at a remote site as quickly as possible to enable business to resume.
However, disaster recovery planning and execution is challenged by factors such as growing data footprints, recovery time, recovery asset management, and cost. There is not one solution that fits all; instead, we adopt customised solutions based on our customers’ needs.
Data center virtualisation and Dell Technologies’ storage-array-based replication opens the door to modern and efficient opportunities in disaster recovery planning. For example, virtual-machine-level images can be replicated to a remote site at regular intervals to meet a predetermined recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO)
Having the plans in place to meet service level agreements (SLAs) in terms of RPO and RTO is a primary objective of disaster recovery planning. However, maintaining a recovery site owned or leased by the customer, along with scalable recovery infrastructure in that site, is an ongoing challenge.
With the growing transition to cloud computing, many organisations are looking to leverage the cloud to enhance their disaster recovery (DR) plan. In the past, organisations found DR to be expensive and difficult to manage (servers, backup, and systems), but the options to reduce the costs and complexity were limited. In fact, DR testing and recoverability were often manual and did not include a routine checklist with pre-planned activity. Most organisations are not confident of recovering in a timely manner when disaster strikes, but this is where Dell Technologies comes in.
With Dell Technologies, our customers can transform their data centre to enable greater operational efficiency, resiliency, and scalability. Whether they want to leverage cloud computing now or in near future, Dell Technologies can help them transform their environment for the future, laying the technical foundation for the data center while modernising their cloud data protection right along with it.
