Narinder, a senior manager in an FMCG company, is in Lucknow working on his presentation for the upcoming dealers’ conference. He tries to access the company VPN to get some data, but does not manage to log in! After many futile attempts, he calls his IT person in Delhi. He is told that that the ISP will be coming in to fix it in two hours.
Narinder checks again later, but the VPN is still not accessible. The IT person says there is some problem with the servers, and the hardware guys will fix it. Six hours later, the VPN is still not accessible.
Is this a familiar story? This is a situation that SMEs (and large enterprises) in India face on almost a daily basis. Many vendors—hardware, operating system, network, ISP connectivity, firewall, VPN—and multiple ones for each, do not guarantee the one thing enterprises want: an available IT setup, available when the business needs it. Instead what enterprises get is a cacophony of vendors pointing fingers at each other.
Enterprises try to solve this with SPOC, a single point of contact. But with multiple vendors, the SPOC doesn’t work. Ironic, that an enterprise IT team works hard to design systems without a single point of failure, and ends up with so many.
It’s now time for what we call, Single Point of Responsibility (SPOR). A person whom you can call in case anything goes down.
The network is down. Call the SPOR.
The hardware is crashing. Call the SPOR.
Hey, there is a bandwidth spike, the SPOR just warned me.
When Progression started delivering cloud services a few years ago, we realized that the success of cloud rides on the cloud service provider’s ability to span hardware, network, connectivity, storage, VPNs, and firewalls —the entire IT infrastructure backbone on which the business runs. That’s when an enterprise can really exploit the true potential of cloud. And that means cloud service providers have to be the Single Point of Responsibility.
At Progression, assuming ownership of all projects we take up is a way of life for us, because IT can be quite complex for any business. For over 17 years we have been simplifying IT for business with our Whatever It Takes approach. SPOR is just an evolution from that.
Who has the single point of responsibility for your IT setup? And how is that working for your business? Do leave a comment.
