IT Infrastructure Management: Cyber Security, Compliance and Business Continuity

Running head: IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
IT Infrastructure Management
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note:

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IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
Table of Contents
Task A........................................................................................................................................2
Task B........................................................................................................................................4
1. Introduction........................................................................................................................4
2. Cyber Threats.....................................................................................................................4
3. Cyber Security....................................................................................................................2
4. Compliance and Business Continuity................................................................................2
5. Conclusion..........................................................................................................................3
References..................................................................................................................................1
Task C........................................................................................................................................4

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IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
Task A
Astra Zeneca Case Study Answers
1. AstraZeneca is the leading biopharmaceutical company. In July, 2007, this
company signed an outsourcing agreement for seven years with IBM. The total contract was
of 1.4 billion dollars. The extensive SLA involved 32 schedules and 90 clauses for governing
provision of the IT infrastructure services to respective 60 countries. AstraZeneca terminated
SLA on 8th April, 2011. However, the court took the side of AstraZeneca. As per the CIO of
the organization, the outsourcing deal with IBM enabled a specific consistent infrastructure in
every global site. Thus, new technologies, applications and reporting system were effectively
rolled out. Due to the outcome based specifications, the deal was a failure. The main mistake
that this company made was the rapid change of their business and this contract did not have
the ability to deal with the pace.
2. AstraZeneca was not only the guilty convicted in the failure of the contract. IBM
was also a part of it. The main mistake that IBM made was making an extremely large and
long term outsourcing contract of IT and thus IBM was also responsible for this. They should
have understood the business strategies of AstraZeneca and the fact that the business changes
rapidly.
3. Due to the large size of a deal, it is difficult to change the contract as the vendor
accrues their profit from any deal. When the outsource deals are huge, the vendors make huge
investments within the first two years since their service is customized and set up. Next, the
respective vendors expect profit margins in two to three years and hence the extremely larger
deals are for minimum of five years.

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IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
4. AstraZeneca and IBM had made major mistakes for making such huge contracts of
1.4 billion dollars. The main motive of these two major corporations was to make maximum
profit for their businesses. The only thing that they did not consider was the constraints or
problems that would have been possible for the contract. Since, the contract was an extremely
large and outsourcing IT deal, it suffered major problems and thus both the companies have
to settle with legal court case. The technical problems were not taken into consideration and
thus their strategy failed.
5. The 2007 SLA or service level agreement was doomed to fail as there were some of
the constraints from the beginning of the deal. The first and the foremost constraint was the
extremely large IT outsourcing deal. Although, the contract was for seven years, it became a
failure in four years. The deal consisted of utilization of specifications that were based on
outcomes and these specifications were utilized for encouraging the innovation within
vendors. Thus, this SLA was doomed to fail.
6. After the failure of the IT contract with IBM, AstraZeneca undertook another new
strategy to work with the vendors of IT, which focuses on the rapid actions on various
technical problems within any specific cooperative structure. This model replaced the
previous model and comprises of various principles. One of them is “fix first, pay later”. This
specifically means that if type of problem occurs, the company and vendors can easily fix it
by not asking about expenses. Hence, both the parties would be saved.
7. AstraZeneca eventually agreed for faster payment in case of any IT problem to
vendor. If any type of conflict occurs in contract, both of these parties could appeal to the
independent arbiter, who could oversee the policy of cooperation. Thus, legal cases can be
avoided.