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The global pandemic has agitated the world of IT business, resulting in an increased risk of downtime. A study says that 51% of IT managers report an increase in IT downtime since March 2020.
Rapidly moving to the remote work landscape, the development team faces pressure to release applications more quickly which often leads to an increased risk to availability and uptime down the line. Many global companies today make use of highly sophisticated systems and infrastructures, making it harder to pinpoint and resolve issues in IT management.
As a result, business leaders are implementing IT incident response systems that help them fight downtime and increase the efficiency of monitoring the incident response processes. Reducing the human impact has never been more important in terms of lessening burnout and turnover, which can be disastrous for the business in the long run.
What is IT downtime? In an IT management context, ‘downtime’ is any unplanned event that stops production. These are often caused by poor maintenance, storage, or network issues, using outdated fractures, configuration & security issues, and client incidents. However, repeated outages and brownouts can result in delayed deliveries and reputational damages. Also, this may require your employees to work overtime.
The Biggest Challenge
One of the biggest challenges was outdated incident team structures which impact the level of insight and control the production. Typically, organizations implement a tiered response team that responds to issues reported by customers and monitoring tools.
Earlier organizations were more concerned with maintaining service levels while minimizing operations costs. The escalation process would continue until the problem was resolved. Even though this process prioritizes cost savings, it does so at the expense of agility.
Downtime often results in lost revenue, compliance and regulatory penalties, lost customers, a spike in operational costs, and delays related to IT professionals being pulled away from other projects to resolve incidents.
The slower response time might lead to incidents with entry-level team members and can require multiple levels of escalation which directly reflects on customer frustrations, impacting the overall reputational damage of the company.
Fortunately, empowering employees and adopting a proactive approach to preventive IT maintenance, smarter systems and technologies can help your business reduce downtime in the future.
Let’s take a closer look at how you can optimize your IT operations with an effective IT incident response system.
How can Event Management Systems optimize your IT operations?
IT businesses are moving towards more flexible working environments, it is time to rethink incident management efforts including the innovative processes, team structures, practices that reflect the new business standards.
But, what are the best practices companies can implement to achieve their incident resolutions and overcome the biggest threats to business continuity.
Prioritize and Consolidate alerts
Alert fatigue is one of the major concerns and a key contributor to lost productivity. Meaningless and non-actionable alerts can result in notification redundancy.
Prioritizing alerts by identifying critical systems, de-duplicate redundant notifications, and defining a clear-cut hierarchy for alerts can eliminate the excess noise among incident response teams. Consolidated alerts will activate the IT response teams when needed at the right time.
Create an on-call schedule
The rapid pace of technology change, however, means the IT operations must remain flexible to address the current reasons for unplanned downtime.
To avoid alert fatigue, burnout, and inefficiency, you also need to create an on-call schedule that works for your team. The goal is to provide backup support when necessary and effectively evaluate the scheduled tasks regularly.
Leverage Automation
Organizations are increasingly adopting business analytics tools that enable rapid yet data-driven decision-making. Automation can enhance the incident response team’s productivity and reduce alert fatigue by taking care of tasks that have to be done manually by the team member.
Automating alert routing, notification, deduplication, message workflows, status page updates, on-call scheduling, escalation processes, and monitoring can also save the team’s time and reduce human error in routine, repetitive tasks. Additionally, automation can help organizations save money over time.
Communicate Effectively
Communication channels are a significant part of successful incident response management. You need to take on a proactive approach including preventive maintenance, employee training, and other best practices to reduce downtime. Communicating effectively across channels will keep stakeholders and other team collaboration during downtime.
Lack of updates and communication gaps can only lead to more frustration and this impacts the customers if not prioritized properly. It is essential to be on top of the expectations of customers and stakeholders. Having a solid incident communication plan in place can help in successfully optimizing your event management process.
Track the Right Metrics
With fully automated incident response workflows and infrastructures, it is only becoming easier to document the data and track the success metrics. Monitoring the right metrics relevant to your company goals can help accelerate productivity and achieve desired results. It is more likely that your team will review them at regular intervals and keep up with the data. Get clear and upfront about which metrics matter for your team and why by automating reporting whenever possible, saving time for the team.
Conduct Post Mortems
Reviewing incidents after they happen allows you to learn from failures, pinpoint issues, and constantly improve your incident response. Each incident offers a valuable lesson to your team about how to resolve incidents faster, no matter how small the event is.
Despite learning that lessons should not take place while the team is battling to resolve an issue. Hence the importance of capturing the steps the team took to resolve the incident and reviewing them in a post-mortem is vital.
Conclusion
In complex and heterogeneous IT environments, managing day-to-day operations calls for an eye to detail. An integrated approach to managing and reducing downtime is integral to these initiatives, especially with an increased emphasis on maximizing the return on investment of IT alerting systems.
Before choosing your technology, make sure you thoroughly understand your goals, processes, and team needs. Then prioritize putting the right systems in place to help you achieve them. Also, consider the automation features so you can focus on improving performance and move forward.
One such platform is Zapoj, which can reduce costs, increase reliability, increase productivity, and understand internal service delivery requirements to reduce downtime and avoid reputational damage all at the same time. With Zapoj you can automate IT incident response processes, which include features like alert prioritization, on-call scheduling, seamless communication, automated reporting, track metrics, and conduct flawless postmortems. To know more about how you can implement a fully optimized IT Alerting system and enhance the performance of your incident response team, book a demo today!
