Zero Outage Summit: Lack of Dialogue in IT-Industry Cause of Outages

The Zero Outage Executive Summit brought together members of the Zero Outage Industry Standard Association (ZOIS) and their clients at King's Place in London. The aim of the summit was to present the associations work on a common framework of best practices to deliver reliable, secure, end-to-end IT availability, eliminating IT outages that are losing companies money and risking livelihoods and lives. The outcome of the summit which took place on September 14th, 2017 was the commitment to open the association, whose members are well known technology companies to their customers.

     (Photo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/558574/Zero_Outage_Executive_Summit_2017.jpg )
     (Photo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/558573/Zero_Outage_Industry_Standard_Association.jpg )

The association's chairman Stephan Kasulke, SVP Quality at T-Systems International, opened the event. Recognising that an enterprise's IT involves a complex ecosystem of multiple vendors, he emphasised the importance of working together with all major IT players on a common standard. He said: "We are still missing global players such as Amazon or Google. Only when we all work together as partners, we can provide a stable and secure IT-environment for our customers."

Moderator Dietmar Dahmen's introduction "The first rule of fight club: Zero Outage", showed that new technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) or Artificial Intelligence (AI) will challenge enterprises in the future. He said: "No Outages is unrealistic, but only if we set our goals high and work together, we can aim to achieve it."

Professional hacker and university lecturer Eireann Leverett analysed internet outages, dividing them into Murphy (accident) and malice (sabotage) showing today's vulnerabilities around the world.

Petra Hauser CEO of the Exponential Business Hub showed that Zero Outage is becoming increasingly difficult in times of agile developments and ever faster time to market.

Systems outages can be a matter of life or death. Security researcher Dr Marie Moe's heartbeats are generated by her connected pacemaker. She has personally experienced the impact of a firmware update and a software bug on her ability to function. Moe is researching medical devices' vulnerability to hackers. During her speech at the summit she also raised awareness of how important soft skills and common sense are in the IT-industry, especially when it comes to working with life depending medical devices.

The final 'gloves off' discussion flagged up the need for a dialogue between vendors and customers within the IT-industry. Kasulke agreed to open the association for members' customers to initiate an honest dialogue and address diverse expectations on both sides. Ultimately, the Zero Outage standard will bring IT vendors, partners and clients a much-needed quality assurance standard in IT-security and availability.

About Zero Outage Industry Standard: 

Zero Outage Industry Standard is an association based in London, United Kingdom. Members include renowned companies within the IT-sector: Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., EMC Corporation, Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), IBM Corporation, maincubes one GmbH, NetApp, Inc., SAP SE, SUSE PLC, Swisscom AG and T-Systems International GmbH. The Zero Outage industry standard association is providing a framework of best practices and standards to enable the delivery of secure, reliable and highly available end-to-end IT services and solutions. The goal is to develop a common standard for IT processes, platforms, people and security to safeguard quality and reliability at all levels.

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