Industry analyst firm IDC predicts the number of worldwide mobile workers will reach 1 billion by 2011*. Fueling this is the increasing mobile and global nature of business, the desire for companies to offer employee work/life balance programs, and even factors such as rising fuel costs that make telecommuting more and more popular, and thus the need for reliable mobile services.
As more traditional office workers join the mobile workforce, their reliance on mobile devices and services to access mission critical applications such as email and other enterprise applications increases. These new remote workers expect the same speed and quality of service that they experienced in the traditional office environment. For example, when they use the computer in their office to access applications, they know they will get perfect service or be able to physically visit the IT staff for help. However, if they use their mobile device and have slightly less than perfect access to their applications, they might not be able to find the IT staff and will become frustrated and unproductive. This means IT staff needs to take a specialized approach to protect the entire mobile ecosystem in a manner that provides 24x7 access to email and mobile applications – eliminating costly business downtime.
A recent worldwide survey of email availability conducted by Osterman Research shows an average of almost four unexplained IT outages per month directly affecting delivery of email or data to mobile devices or smartphones. Add planned maintenance outages about once a month and Osterman concludes that downtime affecting the mobile workforce is prevalent, if not rampant. If the mobile device business case is to be realized in practice, companies must fully protect their server infrastructure and any single point of failure must be eliminated. A successful mobile workforce requires every enterprise to protect the entire mobile infrastructure.
How Vodafone UK Provides Continuous Mobile Services
Vodafone is an international mobile telecommunications group with equity interests in 25 countries across 5 continents, 260 million customers and 42 partner networks. For more than 20 years, Vodafone has been at the forefront of mobile innovation.
Not only does Vodafone deliver innovative mobile services to their customers, but they are also responsible for supporting their internal mobile workers. Vodafone’s staff rely on their BlackBerry smartphones to access email, calendars and voice services. The service is crucial to Vodafone and the company needs to ensure continuous availability to its business-critical applications.
But, when the company’s BlackBerry service was supported by a single server, senior managers sometimes found they were unable to use key services because of system failure. The system center is based in Germany, and staff working in different time zones were sometimes unable to access email during routine night time maintenance. Since Vodafone’s system center supports a global team, they determined that they needed a solution that would let them carry out maintenance while the server was still live.
Vodafone selected Neverfail, a solution that monitors the health of an organization’s entire email environment, including the server hardware, IT network infrastructure, applications and the operating system. If any threats to availability appear, the Neverfail software immediately takes action to prevent loss of service. This can involve preemptively restarting Windows services, alerting IT staff or automatically switching over to a secondary server so that no downtime or loss of service is experienced. After the issue is resolved, the system switches back to the main servers, again without interruption for the users.
The implementation began in January 2008. Vodafone Professional Services worked alongside certified professionals and Neverfail’s technical team to train two engineers who managed the implementation process. They also conducted on-site training sessions for the company’s operations team. The sessions covered rollout, ongoing support and day-to-day management of solutions. The Vodafone implementation team is now fully equipped to manage the delivery and support of similar solutions.
Since going live in February, Vodafone now has a robust, highly available solution that helps keep the company’s BlackBerry services operational around the clock. In addition, they have reduced the overall time and cost involved in supporting the BlackBerry server.
Vodafone’s staff can now carry out routine maintenance, test new releases and resolve server service issues while the system is still live. With Neverfail, failover is seamless and users benefit from an automated failover process that takes place in seconds. This takes the burden off of engineers who can now deal with maintenance issues immediately, instead of having to trigger the failover process manually.
Andrew Barnes is senior vice president of Corporate Development for Neverfail.
* Source: IDC, Worldwide Mobile Worker Population 2007-2011 Forecast, Doc # 209813, December 2007.