Change of Course

Business Case 2

Neutrino Communications was a mid-size telecom equipment

manufacturer.

… with latest annual sales of almost a billion dollars.

Increasing margins through cost reduction and streamlining

operations was the company’s motto.

In the past decade, company executives watched their product

margins erode on a quarterly basis -

as an ever-increasing number of competitors entered the market.

The executives ran the business with an ever-evolving business model,

constantly innovating to stay ahead of the competition.

Cost reduction of successful products and streamlining of operations kept the company

in The Market

And

in front of their customers.

Reaching the end of the 3rd quarter, a major streamlining effort for migrating the internal IT e-mail infrastructure to the cloud was well

underway.

A year had been spent in analyzing cloud providers and cloud services for a suitable

replacement for the aging, onsite deployment.

With RFP’s and answering bids received, executive management had selected their cloud

provider of choice.

The initial pilot group of testers, whose internal e-mail accounts had been migrated

from their local deployment to the cloud provider, reported a high-level of satisfaction.

reported a high-level of satisfaction.

With green lights all around, and users reporting a positive experience, the executives

were ready to commit the e-mail communications of the entire business to the

cloud provider.

A “go-live” date for mass migration of all internal e-mail accounts was set for just after

the year-end holidays.

But…

Just as the CIO was ready to commit his signature to the finalized paperwork to cement

the relationship with the cloud provider, he received a distress call from the CEO -

e-mail access was down, was IT Operations on top of the problem?

Soon, more calls and helpdesk tickets poured into the CIO’s helpdesk and desktop teams, with multiple pilot users of the cloud provider’s e-

mail system reporting loss of access.

As reported by his own ops team, the backend e-mail databases at the cloud provider were down

for reasons still unknown to the cloud provider’s own ops team…

Three days later, e-mail databases were rebuilt at the cloud provider and ...

… service was restored.

Unfortunately, the damage had already occurred to the business...

with multiple business units reporting missed project deadlines…

the sales team using personal e-mail accounts to correspond with outside leads and contacts…

and at least one external customer deliverable overdue…

since critical information had been locked away and unavailable during the outage.