Issue 2 | July 2010

If it isn’t recorded... it never happened

How often have IT departments been confronted with network issue’s that mysteriously appear and disappear at random? How often has the FD been asked to sign off on “essential” and often “emergency” upgrades?

These are the challenges faced by businesses every day. Businesses large and small that rely on secure and stable communications infrastructure to function in today’s fast paced ultra-competitive landscape.

Never before have businesses been under so much pressure to cut the cost of doing business whilst maintaining or improving customer satisfaction. Thus we have a proliferation of VOIP, intranet/extranet, websites and services sourced from the cloud. All of these in addition to the traditional E-Mail, Database, Storage and desktop service delivery challenges. Whilst it’s almost impossible to predict what new technology innovations will again change the face of ICT delivery one fundamental will always remain: The infrastructure used to deliver those services.

We all agree on how important it is to have secure and stable infrastructure but how, if at all, do we measure this stability and availability of resource? 

Fundamentally we must take a holistic view of the business infrastructure as a whole, measuring and recording device AND service availability in tandem to get a picture of the overall health of the system. Knowing how the system behaves on a day to day basis helps IT departments quickly narrow down anomalous issues, allowing problems to be nipped in the bud before they spiral out of control.

It also empowers IT managers to go back to the FD with effective utilisation reports proving beyond a shadow of a doubt why a certain upgrade is required. Capacity planning becomes BAU with little to no administrative overhead to IT managers who are busy providing a first class service to their users.

Alternatively businesses can wait until a system is on its knees to try to figure out what went or is going wrong, and how much money needs to be thrown at the problem to make it go away.

As the saying goes an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

To find out more about how a&o systems can assist you, call us on 0870 971 8800 or email communications@aogroup.co.uk