Follow the Sun Support

February 27th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

In the olden days, London Windows Support looked after London servers. New York looked after New York servers, and so on, the lines or regional demarcation were set. The problem with this is as follows:

  • Inefficient use of resources
  • Poor global support
  • Everybody thinks local - that’s not how we do it here.

As business needs grew, this model became redundant in some of the large banks, some of the IT departments decided to operate with the business lines in a follow the sun approach. This being that the infrastructure support, the IT follows the sun, however is up, supports the systems, however is asleep does not. The idea being that a server failing at 3am London time should not mean that we need to get a London server engineer up, firstly the New York engineer, can log on see what’s going on and attempt a fix, escalating to London if necessary, key to this is an effective operations team, effective dialog between the teams, and understanding each regions way of working, until we can move towards a state where a server built in London is identical to one in France, one in New York etc.

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