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Do We Have To Sneak Audit Site Hosts Now?
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August 5th, 2010
For retail IT directors, the end of American Eagle Outfitters' 8-day E-Commerce collapse just marks the start of a new fear: that they'll have to begin dispatching staffers to do sneak inspections of outsourcers. Will they need to burn precious staff time in unannounced audits, looking over the shoulders of service providers to make sure those techs are doing their jobs?
Will they eventually have to turn to a whole new class of outsourcers who do nothing but check up on the big outsourced teams? And who will watch those watchers?
Or is this an overreaction to a disastrous but highly unusual event? A wholesale failure like the American Eagle debacle is big news because it's so rare. Datacenter disasters happen. There's no way to bring the risk to zero. And beyond making sure good practices are being followed, returns diminish quickly--you can suddenly find you're spending a lot of money to prevent something that almost never happens.
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2 Comments | Read Do We Have To Sneak Audit Site Hosts Now?
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Our Comment SPAM system is getting very aggressive these days and has been blocking legitimate comments. If you post a comment and don't see it appear within 2 hours or so, can you please send a heads-up to customer-service@storefrontbacktalk.com? Ideally, please include the time you posted the comment. That will allow us to try and hunt for it. Thanks! P.S. We're working on fixing the system, but we don't want to lose any valuable comments in the meantime.
Our Comment SPAM system is getting very aggressive these days and has been blocking legitimate comments. If you post a comment and don't see it appear within 2 hours or so, can you please send a heads-up to customer-service@storefrontbacktalk.com? Ideally, please include the time you posted the comment. That will allow us to try and hunt for it. Thanks! P.S. We're working on fixing the system, but we don't want to lose any valuable comments in the meantime.
-Christine
August 5th, 2010 at 2:25 pm
Outsourcing is a lot like franchising. You franchise your business so you can scale it. Doing so however, you end up depending on hundreds or thousands of independent franchisees to represent your brand before the public. If you don’t verify the execution at store level in a franchise business, you are walking dead. Corporate programs need to be executed consistently, health and safety standards adhered to, training taken, etc…Do retail chains solely rely on each franchisee’s goodwill and the training program? No they don’t. Good will and training are necessary but not sufficient. Large retail chains, particularly those in the food service, send district managers to their stores to do “store walks”, “store visits” or “store audits” as they are sometime called. Likewise I don’t think you can or should blindly outsource. Surprise visits? Absolutely. Furthermore, visits should be scripted and recorded digitally. Any non-compliant issues should be noted and remedied. Trust your partners yes, but verify…
August 17th, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Monitor and response to the failure backup of logs on the disaster recovery site is easy and basic. The alarm message must be somewhere. The problem is who will response and how to upgrade if fail to response. Those questions should be answered in the SLA.
Do we need a special audit on site? No necessary! However, we should review our SLA and make it clear on how to response and upgrade these kind of failures.