Are the Royal Mail trucks that deliver mail overheads? I think not. So why would the IT that runs the sorting depots and responds to tracking requests and capture the gun scans when mail is delivered etc be considered overheads? IT now is value added business essential, not once a month payroll or profit/loss production. No IT == no business. So clearly not an overhead but a vital cog in the delivery of services/goods. It's silly to argue otherwise. It's also silly to try and save money on IT and have these frequent outages. I've worked for enough Fortune/FTSE 100 companies to know outages cause brand damage, and a well configured data center with appropriate Disaster Recovery (DR)/dual site operation is worth it's weight in gold. How would FEDEX or UPS manage if they lost IT for 24 hours every so often? The entire company would be at a standstill, all 500 planes and 50K employees sat idle until it comes back.
G