The perils of an Icarus support contract

Are your service level agreements and your backup software support contracts in alignment?

A lot of companies will make the decision to run with “business hours” backup support – 9 to 5, or some variant like that, Monday to Friday. This is seen as a cheaper option, and for some companies, depending on their requirements, it can be a perfectly acceptable arrangement too. That’s usually the case where there are no SLAs, or smaller environments where the business is geared to being able to operate for protracted periods with minimal IT.

What can sometimes be forgotten in attempts to restrain budgets is whether reduced support for production support systems has any impact on meeting business requirements relating to service level agreements. If for instance, you have to start getting data flowing back within 2 hours of a failure, a system fails at midnight and the subsequent recovery has issues, your chances of being able to hit your service level agreement start to plummet if you don’t have a support contract that guarantees you access to help at this point in time.

A common response to this from management – be it IT, or financial – is “we’ll buy per-incident support if we need to“. In other words, the service level agreements the business has established necessitates a better support contract than is budgeted for, so it is ‘officially’ planned to “wing it” in the event of a serious issue.

I describe that as an Icarus Support Contract.

Icarus, as you may remember, is from Greek mythology. His father Daedalus fashioned wings out of feathers and wax so that he and Icarus could escape from prison. They escaped, but Icarus, enjoying the sensation of flight so much, disregarded his father’s warnings about flying too high. The higher he got, the closer he was to the sun. Then, eventually, the sun melted the wax, his wings fell off, and he fell to his death into the sea.

Planning to buy per-incident support is effectively building a contingency plan based on unbooked, unallocated resources.

It’s also about as safe as relying on wings held together by wax when flying high. Sure, if you’re lucky, you’ll sneak through it; but is do you really want to trust data recovery and SLAs to luck? What if those unbooked resources are already working on something for someone who does have a 24×7 contract? There’s a creek for that – and a paddle too.

In a previous job, I once discussed disaster recovery preparedness with an IT manager at a financial institution. Their primary site and their DR site were approximately 150 metres away from one other, leaving them with very little wiggle room in the event of a major catastrophe in the city. (Remember, the site being inaccessible can be just as deadly to business as the site being destroyed – and while there’s a lot less things that may destroy two city blocks, there’s plenty more things that might cut off two city blocks from human access for days.)

When questioned about the proximity of the two sites, he wasn’t concerned. Why? They were a big financial institution, they had emergency budget, and they were a valued customer of a particular server/storage manufacturer. Quite simply, if something happened and they lost both sites, they’d just go and buy or rent a truckload of new equipment and get themselves back operational again via backups. I always found this a somewhat dubious preparedness strategy – it’s definitely an example of an Icarus support contract.

I’ve since talked to account managers at multiple server/storage vendors, including the one used in this scenario, and all of them, in this era of shortened inventory streams, have scoffed at the notion of being able to instantly drop in 200+ servers and appropriate storage at the drop of a hat – especially in a situation where there’s a disaster and there’s a run on such equipment. (In Australia for instance, a lot of high end storage kit usually takes 3-6 weeks to arrive since it’s normally shipped in from overseas.)

Icarus was a naïve fool who got lost in the excitement of the moment. The fable of Icarus teaches us the perils of ignoring danger and enjoying the short-term too much. In this case, relying on future unbooked resources in the event of an issue in order to save a few dollars here and there in the now isn’t all that reliable. It’s like the age-old tape cost-cutting: if you manage to shave 10% off the backup media budget by deciding not to backup certain files or certain machines, you may very well get thanked for it. However, no-one will remember congratulating you when there’s butt-kicking to be done if it turns out that data no longer being backed up actually needed recovery.

So what is an Icarus support contract? Well, it’s a contract where you rely on luck. It’s a gamble – that in the event of a serious problem, you can buy immediate assistance at the drop of a hat. Just how bad can planning on being lucky get? Well, consider that over the last 18 months the entire world has been dealing with Icarus financial contracts – they were officially called Sub-Prime Mortgages, but the net result was the same – they were contracts and financial agreements built around the principle of luck.

Do your business a favor, and avoid Icarus support contracts. That’s the real way to get lucky in business – to not factor luck into your equations.