NETWORK AVAILABILITY IMPROVEMENT SUPPORT OPERATIONAL RISK MANAGEMENT ANALYSIS

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DATA SHEET

NETWORK AVAILABILITY IMPROVEMENT SUPPORT OPERATIONAL RISK MANAGEMENT ANALYSIS

Operational Risk Management Analysis helps you maintain and improve network availability by evaluating the risks in your operations infrastructure capabilities and making recommendations to resolve those risks.

SERVICE OVERVIEW

If you are planning or have recently made changes to your network, you may be faced with increased risk of network outages and service loss. Evaluating the current state of the processes and support systems that provide your operations infrastructure capabilities is a critical step toward maintaining and improving network availability. Preserving the high performance, high availability, and high reliability of business resources has a direct effect on profitability.

The vast majority of service outages are caused by process problems or human error.¹ Without the expertise and resources to understand the current state of your processes and support systems, unrecognized operational problems could remain. These problems could pose significant risk to your network reliability and availability objectives as well as the ability of the network to efficiently support your organization’s business and customers.

Cisco^® Advanced Services can help by working with your team to identify gaps between your current operations infrastructure capabilities and leading industry practices and by making recommendations for addressing those gaps. Cisco Advanced Services engineers and consultants have years of experience and proven operations expertise in helping leading companies in various industries to achieve operational excellence by optimizing their IT processes and operations infrastructures. Cisco Systems^® has the knowledge and dedicated resources to address operational risk. This type of support can augment the knowledge and decision-making capabilities of your staff, reduce operating expenses, and increase overall network reliability.

Evaluating Your Operations Infrastructure Capabilities

The Operational Risk Management Analysis service helps you understand, identify, and mitigate operational risks that could potentially affect your network reliability, management, and support infrastructure. By assessing processes and operations systems that are critical to service delivery and support on your network, this service helps you gauge how able your organization is to effectively deliver, maintain, upgrade, expand, and support network services. Recommendations for addressing identified gaps and controlling operational processes can help you reduce the total cost of ownership for your network and improve network availability.

The Operational Risk Management Analysis service assesses 14 functional areas related to your network design, operational processes, and operational readiness. It identifies the most common and pervasive gaps in each functional area relative to leading practices and provides recommendations that can help you improve overall reliability and availability. The 14 functional areas are addressed through six modules:

1. Managing service support

2. Managing change

3. Managing service performance 5. Detailed operations benchmark 6. Detailed availability measurement 4. Managing service resiliency

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Module 1: Managing Service Support

This module helps you address problematic areas in your day-to-day network operations and processes that are contributing to downtime by addressing the following areas:

• Fault management—Detecting and isolating faults in the network infrastructure using operations processes and network management system tools.

• Incident management—Supporting rapid service restoration in the event of failure.

• Problem management—Managing incidents and analyzing root causes for recurring problems using a systematic process.

• Service-level management—Defining, measuring, and reporting on service delivery relative to service-level agreements dictated by the business.

• Staffing and expertise—Identifying the skills and technical expertise your staff needs to support core and advanced network technologies.

Module 2: Managing Change

This module helps you plan for the types of network and operational changes you may desire for your network and to make changes efficiently, consistently, and transparently by addressing the following areas:

• Configuration management—Managing aspects of network element configurations such as inventory management, configuration file management, and so on.

• Release management—Systematic process to manage the selection, deployment, and maintenance of software releases.

• Change management—Systematic process and controls to manage changes to the production environment.

• New solution deployment—Planning, testing, and quality-control measures for deploying new network services or technologies.

Module 3: Managing Service Performance

This module helps you improve the quality of service delivery by maximizing network and asset utilization performance in the following areas:

• Availability management—Defining, measuring, and reporting on network availability using systematic processes.

• Performance and capacity management—Gathering network performance and capacity indicators for monitoring and managing the performance and capacity of the underlying system.

• Service-level management—Defining, measuring, and reporting on the service delivery relative to agreed-on standards or service- level agreements.

Module 4: Managing Service Resiliency

This module helps improve network resiliency through device redundancy, and by helping to prevent security risks and intrusions and guard against network threats in the following areas:

• Security incident management—Managing operations infrastructure and device-level security attributes critical to the continuous operation of network elements.

• Service continuity—Helping to ensure service availability in the event of network failures or security threats.

• Resiliency—Helping to ensure network stability and strategic redundancy.

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Module 5: Detailed Operations Benchmarks

This module examines your network operations relative to leading industry practices by doing the following:

• Identifying detailed network operational baseline and comparing it to industry leading practices.

• Identifying gaps and providing recommendations regarding which functional areas need to be addressed to help enable achievement of availability targets aligned with your business goals.

Module 6: Detailed Availability Measurement

This module helps you establish a consistent process to manage and measure availability by doing the following:

• Identifying data that needs to be extracted from customer trouble ticket systems.

• Developing and transferring ownership of the process for retrieving, processing, and calculating availability data.

• Developing and transferring ownership of an availability and trending report that illustrates end-user service availability on a rolling period basis. The report may include end-user availability achievements and a breakdown of reported service outages by root cause.

Implementing the Recommendations

The Operational Risk Management Analysis service prioritizes recommendations into

gap resolution projects and provides IT metrics for measuring improvements in operational efficiency and network availability. The service concludes with

a 10-day

consultation to help direct and focus activities required to implement the recommendations for addressing gaps. After completing the 10- day consultation, you might consider purchasing the Cisco Gap Resolution Support service, which enables you to work directly with your Cisco Advanced Services experts to implement the gap resolution projects.

ACTIVITIES, DELIVERABLES, AND BENEFITS

Table 1 Operational Risk Management Analysis Activities, Deliverables, and Benefits

Activities Benefits

Identify and analyze critical performance indicators and operational gaps in the functional areas covered in the selected modules.

Assessment activities may include:

• Identify and understand the performance indicators that are critical to your overall service delivery and support.

• Conduct onsite interviews with identified stakeholders responsible for engineering and operations functions within your organization.

• Review the current state and capabilities of engineering and operations teams and processes by analyzing process workflow and documentations.

• Identify critical operations gaps that pose significant risks of affecting your crucial performance indicators.

Present a detailed summary of recommendations based on the Cisco Operational Risk Management Analysis report.

Provide a 10-day consultation after delivering the Cisco Operational Risk Management Analysis report to help direct and focus activities required to implement the recommendations for addressing the

• Reduces overall operations costs and total cost of ownership by gaining efficiency in service delivery and support.

• Improves operations effectiveness through process and network management tool optimization.

• Improves network availability by identifying and minimizing the causes of operational risk and adopting rigid control of operations processes.

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Deliverables

Develop the Cisco Operational Risk Management Analysis report.

The report may include:

• Descriptions of performance indicators that are critical to your overall service delivery and support

• Gap analysis covering the relevant functional areas based on the selected modules

Functional Areas

Fault management New solution deployment Incident management Availability management Problem management Performance and capacity

management

Service-level management Security incident management Configuration management Service continuity

Release management Resiliency

Change Management Staffing and Expertise

SUMMARY

Cisco Systems offers various service programs to help accelerate customer success. These innovative service programs are delivered through a unique combination of people, processes, tools, and partners, resulting in high levels of customer satisfaction. Cisco services help you to protect your network investment, optimize network operations, and prepare the network for new applications to extend network intelligence and the power of your business.

AVAILABILITY AND ORDERING INFORMATION

Cisco Operational Risk Management Analysis is available globally and may be purchased as a standalone service or as part of your subscription to Cisco Network Availability Improvement Support. Additional services can help enhance performance of your network; for more information, contact your local Cisco representative.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

For more information about Operational Risk Management Analysis and additional Network Availability Improvement Support services or other Cisco services, contact your Cisco service account manager or visit www.cisco.com/warp/public/437/services/rt59/index.html.

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