Target State Resilience Assessment for a Large Mutual Organisation
Overview
A large Australian member organisation needed to assess the resilience of the target state for a significant business transformation program.
Diaxion was asked to conduct the assessment with the aim of identifying improvements and areas of risk, focus and validation. Key findings and prioritised recommendations were presented to and accepted by the organisation.
The Challenge
Our client is one of the largest Mutual organisations in Australia with a purpose to improve people’s lives by addressing their needs in the areas of mobility, home and leisure. The organisation’s strategy aims to grow its membership base, deliver more products and services, and make membership more meaningful and relevant.
In support of its strategy, our client was undertaking a transformation program resulting in the consolidation and modernisation of many of its business systems resulting in a single member view. This included a migration of some systems to the cloud leveraging heavily Salesforce and MuleSoft, other cloud services and on-premise system integration. The program was at advanced stages of its rollout and the organisation wanted to assess the resilience of the target state to identify improvements and areas of focus or validation to ensure that the company’s risk profile was improved.
Based on its proven cloud, architectural and resilience experience, Diaxion was asked to undertake a high-level assessment of the solution architecture and its integration to on-premise systems. Diaxion was also asked to assess SaaS and PaaS elements within the context of the business services they enabled, as well as integration to other services being delivered.
The Solution
Diaxion’s engagement followed a phased approach of Discovery, Analyse and Optimise. In the Discovery phase, Diaxion undertook the work by reviewing documentation and conducting workshops. The initial documentation requested covered various areas including business services, solution design and architecture, recovery processes, delivery channels and infrastructure, data flows, testing strategy and concurrency mapping, BIA, network architecture, operational processes and root cause analysis for previous outages.
After reviewing the documentation, Diaxion conducted workshops to validate the information provided, discover missing information or data points, and subsequently complete the Discovery phase of the engagement.
The workshops were held with key stakeholders across the business including the Operations Manager, transformation program solution architects and lead developers, Network Architect, Cloud and Infrastructure Manager, application SME’s, and Disaster Recovery representatives. At the completion of the workshops, Diaxion undertook further discovery as required, before providing our client with an informal preliminary assessment.
In the Analyse phase, Diaxion conducted analysis on the information and data gathered to identify areas for further investigation or concern and highlight missing information. Findings were subsequently documented followed by recommendations for the organisation to achieve its desired resilience improvement outcomes. A scored risk rating was defined for each finding.
The Optimise phase saw Diaxion developing a presentation that documented all findings and recommendations. After our client reviewed the presentation, Diaxion conducted a walk-through to discuss the content and gather feedback. The document was then updated and resubmitted for acceptance.
The Outcome
The final presentation delivered by Diaxion outlined the key findings and recommendations covering technical and non-technical areas. It included a heat map of the issues and risks, a set of recommendations to detect, prevent or mitigate the risks, suggested prioritisation for the recommendations, and the estimated time required for implementation.
A new program stream used by the client to assess, mitigate or remediate any of the findings prior to completion of a major phase was created to run in parallel to the roll out. This enabled the board and senior executives to have confidence that the large transformation program also resulted in an improvement of the organisation’s services resilience and risk profile.
