• IBM among Brocade, Cisco, Dell EMC, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), NetApp, SAP, SUSE and T-Systems to develop a consistent standard of IT-quality throughout the industry.
  • Stephan Kasulke, SVP Quality T-Systems voted as new chairman of board of directors for the Zero Outage Industry Standard.

The Zero Outage Industry Standard Association announced today that IBM has joined the association as a founding member to provide a common framework for IT-Quality with a focus on platforms, people, processes and security. Within the next weeks all partners will continue to work together to specify new guidelines for the industry standard which will be published on the association’s website zero-outage.com

Bernhard J Klingenberg, CTO, IBM Resiliency Services said: “In today’s digitized world, ‘always-on’ services and solutions are paramount for IBM clients and customers. IBM has a proud tradition of supporting open source communities and industry collaborations, and always strives to serve our clients’ interests in an integrated and unified way. We are honored to contribute our experience as a leading services integrator to this new standard with the Zero Outage Industry Standard Association to encourage the continued availability and reliability of IT infrastructures today and in the future.”

During the association’s first board of directors meeting on November 25th, 2016, Stephan Kasulke, SVP global Quality at T-Systems International has been voted as new chairman of the board of directors for the Zero Outage Industry Standard association.

He explained: “As an organization’s IT infrastructure can involve a complex ecosystem of technologies from a variety of vendors, there are often differing levels of service level agreements in place which can lead to critical defaults and security issues. I am very enthusiastic to be the first Chairman of the Zero Outage Association – this is the start of a long journey towards a stable Telecommunications, IT and IoT.”

The group announced itself to the world in November:

IT giants go in search of zero downtime standard for enterprise IT

Digitization is in full swing: machines communicate with each other, processes are becoming more and more efficient and automation is an integral part of the process. But all can only work if the IT behind it runs smoothly. A failure, even for a few minutes, can have fatal consequences. If production bands are stopped due to IT problems, companies are threatened with image losses and costs of millions.

If systems fail in the airport tower or in hospitals in the worst case scenario, human life is threatened. No matter how big a company is or which industry it belongs to, a reliable and smoothly functioning of information and communication technology is important. Therefore quality is becoming a decisive competitive factor in the age of digitalization. According to Gartner, the average CIO is already spending 18 percent of the organization’s budget in support of digitalization, with that number expected to increase to 28 percent by 2018.

Last month IBM issued its cyber resiliency report with the respected Ponemon Institute

Cyber attack readiness is falling – major global study reveals