Rev2 Networks

RiskView financial case study – outage risk
RiskView financial case study – business risk

RiskView financial case study – outage risk

One of the world’s largest financial services firms uses Rev2’s RiskView outage risk analytics application to identify previously unrecognized outage risks underlying its trading services delivery infrastructure.  The Company is leveraging RiskView in the same way as telecommunications service providers – to ensure a better experience for service customers.

The Company’s Chief Technology Officer reports that, using RiskView, his organization obtained a 30% reduction in customer service outage materiality for a crucial business application, as measured over two fiscal quarters.

Materiality Tracking

For data input, the Company uses one data source: trouble-tickets from BMC Software’s Remedy Helpdesk.  Remedy tickets are analyzed and assigned a materiality score, which weighs their potential to cause service outages. The scoring identifies potential areas of customer impact based on chronic and intermittent faults.

The Company uses RiskView to monitor applications according to their relative materiality. The materiality score reflects their overall impact to clients.  Over the two-quarter period, the materiality of all of the top five applications trended down.   The application that a tiger team was assigned to focus on dropped more than the others.

“We check in with RiskView every week, and can track how our fixes have progressed.  I don’t just look at the week, I look at the preceding 30 days. From this I can see how the latest week is affecting the last synthetic month.  This allows us to see what is actually working.”

“With this approach, we were able to identify one application early on as a trouble spot that would require us to devote resources (a tiger team). We then identified the 2^nd place and the 3^rd place applications, and observed what they had in common.”

Meaningful Change

In the aggregate, the tiger team changed circuits, upgraded bandwidth, and changed servers.  After the fixes were prioritized and executed, the RiskView materiality scores dropped significantly. Additionally, this turned out to be an area where the organization was receiving a specific set of client complaints. After the tiger team fixes, almost all of the client complaints went away.

“So the anecdotal evidence supports the data, which is that we made a meaningful change by focusing on the issues and resolutions that matter,” says the CTO.

Taking Action

“RiskView is great at detecting potential problems and leading us to the culprits,” says the CTO.  “But we actually realize the greatest value from RiskView after we follow up and take action to address service outages. When we initially deployed RiskView, we quickly identified the first big application problem area and the cause behind it. We put our tiger team on it and defused it.  If you’re willing to resource it, you can see some pretty dramatic improvements in materiality scores.”

“Many enterprises managing large infrastructures are like service providers in that service availability is crucial to their customers,” he explains.  ”What was critical was making investments in two areas.  One is in finding the issues – that’s what RiskView does.  And the other is in fixing the issues.  And after the fixes are made, RiskView comes back in to measure the results and demonstrate its value.”

Copyright ©2012 Rev2. All rights reserved. The RiskView® solution is a registered trademark of Rev2. The Rev2 Business Risk Analytics™ logo design and the Risk Concentration Analysis™ (RCA) methodology are trademarks of Rev2. All other trademarks in this document are the properties of their respective owners.

RiskView® financial case study – business risk

One of our customers is a Fortune 100 financial services organization with more than three million active and retired employees. With hundreds of billions of dollars in combined assets under management, this organization offers a range of investment products and services including personal retirement planning, income and wealth protection, insurance, and asset management.

To continue to meet the challenges of its customers, the organization makes a significant, ongoing investment in its information services infrastructure.  In 2010, the organization faced many challenges with managing this infrastructure, as most national-scale organizations do at some point.

One critical challenge facing the information organization at that time was a number of chronic outage events.  Chronic outages are common but can cause a threat to the availability of information services.  The infrastructure team was able to recognize that their biggest events were related to problems in the network.  To eradicate this issue, however, they needed to determine if there were systemic issues throughout all layers in their network stack.  To identify the sources and find a resolution to these outages, the organization implemented the RiskView Service Assurance & Business Continuity module of Rev2’s Risk Concentration Analysis™ framework and visualization engine.

RiskView collects data from many systems and sources throughout the organization’s infrastructure, including automated mainframe system data, application performance data, health and monitoring tools, and more than 300,000 trouble tickets per month.  RiskView correlates the data and generates reports that assign numerical values known as Materiality Scores. These scores help the team quantify the potential impact of each outage on the availability of its services.

As expected, the scores helped the team identify risks of outages at all layers of the network.  Unexpectedly, however, RiskView analysis also discovered previously unknown concentrations of risk in one of the organization’s key mainframe applications.  Significantly, the Materiality Scores helped the team ascertain that these application failures presented as great a risk to service availability as the network outages.

To resolve the issue and eliminate the threat to services, the application vendor was contacted.  It was determined that, over time, a workstream process had evolved around the application that presented challenges that the application was not designed to handle.  A new process was designed and implemented that took the extra load off of the application, enabling the team to maximize its performance.

“RiskView helps us find concentrations of risk in our infrastructure that are incredibly important to our service offerings but we can’t otherwise see,” says the organization’s CIO.  “This has enabled us to implement policies and processes that enable us to continue smooth service operations, save on support costs, and avoid costly disruptions of service.”

RiskView has added value to other areas of the organization’s information systems infrastructure as well.  In 2010, the team launched a nationwide initiative aimed at business transformation, which included the implementation of programs for application modernization and infrastructure stabilization.  Because of the investment committed to these programs, failure was not an option.  To determine concentrations of risks that could cause these developing programs to fail, the organization piloted the RiskView Program & Process module.

To contextualize the risks to the initiative, the team first had to define “Failure.”  It was determined that the crucial program metrics were Scope, Time, and Cost – and that falling short of the targets on any one of these three elements would constitute Failure.

RiskView collected and consolidated all of the proposed program management data and identified two types of material risk aggregated in the combined program’s Test Controls:  Those that weren’t defined, and those that weren’t measured.  Armed with this analysis, the team was able to revisit and redesign the Test Controls.

“RiskView discovered that the biggest risks in the program were that we hadn’t yet determined what needed to be tested,” says the CIO.  “With this crucial information we were able to generate a new set of program activities around upgrading our testing abilities, well before they had a chance to impact our overall business transformation program.  Today we are deploying the RiskView Program Management module as part of the entire initiative.”

For more information, please contact Rev2 at inforev2com.

Copyright ©2012 Rev2. All rights reserved. The RiskView® solution is a registered trademark of Rev2. The Rev2 Business Risk Analytics™ logo design and the Risk Concentration Analysis™ (RCA) methodology are trademarks of Rev2. All other trademarks in this document are the properties of their respective owners.