"Risk Management and Operational Excellence "

We all as CIO, understand risk involve in IT operation in any organization. Word risk is very risky as it involves lots process management in the following areas.
 
1.       SDLC (Design and Development)
2.       Application (Ip / Op) QC test
3.       Application module integration
4.       OS / DB availability
5.       Network availability
6.       Data redundancy
7.       Server Availability
8.       IT information security

As we all knows risk is involve from top to bottom, if anything goes wrong in any of the above entire business is on risk. So its management and planning for fail over is must to have in any enterprise.

SDLC risk can be minimized or managed by consultation design with all stake holders of that application, similarly development risk can be minimized by close monitoring of mapped developed module as per design architecture.

Once application module are ready as per design architecture then most important is that to run a QC test with actual data and input/output parameters so that it can be verified whether module is working / providing output as per functional design or is there any bug to fix?

Once the module is tested with all QC parameters then it comes to integration test with existing application again one more QC test with all I/O parameter of application is required to find whether its integration is perfectly fine of any bug need to be fixed.

Now as application is ready with all integration parameter and it been hosted on production server then it became more important to provide OS and Database tuning and consistency so that application and provide desired outcome for the business. Also we need to work out the failure/contingency plan for both the components i.e.  OS/DB. So we need to work around to provide cluster to OS and replication to DB could be on same site or on remote depending on business criticality.
We need to build the redundancy at storage level as well do that single point of failure in any single/multiple disk can be handled without loss of any single bit of data.

Since we all aware about accessibility of any application is required the availability of network connectivity and server hardware so we also need to work around for  redundancy for both so we can either choose private/public cloud or hardware server cluster with multiple network connectivity for same site.
Since we have considered on all the aspects of risk management for IT infra and application now it comes to secure our data/information, since any business success / failure all depend on data analytics. So we need to secure our IT infra from internal thread by providing appropriate access controls for accessing network, server, DB, application and from external by providing FW, IDS/IPS, WAFs etc.

We should also use DLP system if any enterprise can afford the solution to prevent data loss from internal sources.
By the above we can do risk management at various level but for operational excellence to our business enterprise, we need to provide state of art on demand business analytics which can help business leader in enterprise growth as well as scalable IT infrastructure to meet future requirement on the fly without even singe hindrance business operations. This can be achieved by implementation of private cloud in your enterprise, and can help to reduce cost of infrastructure with high ROI.