Johannesburg, 28 Jul 2020
The sudden shift to remote working has had a massive impact on all companies and almost every team is having to adapt the way it works in order to continue to operate effectively. While this is true of almost every function, the burden placed on IT teams has risen dramatically as a result of having to keep an expanded remote workforce online while adapting to working remotely themselves.
"There are a couple of things that have happened," said Kenneth Dolbey, New Business Development at Sourcing. "The first is that IT managers have found themselves unbelievably busy. They've had to change everything about the way that everything works. Some companies have had to migrate entire call centres, with hundreds of agents, to a work-from-home model. To make this happen, you need the technology to just work and any issues that do arise need to be addressed promptly. In addition, the complexity of supporting remote workers is increased by having to troubleshoot a diverse range of network configurations and end-user devices."
Keeping a company’s IT infrastructure up and running in this kind of environment isn’t just a case of hiring more people to bolster the support team. The expectation that companies are not going to look like they used to requires them to take a long, hard look at how they structure their organisations, with traditional support systems a particular area of concern.
"Just like other line managers are having to adapt their management style to running a remote team, the IT team has to adapt to an environment where they can’t get ‘hands-on’ with a troublesome piece of equipment,” explains Dolbey. If support organisations want to be able to meet the evolving needs of their users, they are going to have to take advantage of established best practice guidelines."
The example of not being able to physically interact with a piece of equipment illustrates the importance of end-to-end visibility of the entire IT environment. An issue with one system can often have massive knock-on effects on business operations. It’s critical that companies can see not just what they have, but how these systems rely on each other so that the potential business impact can be understood and the correct priority assigned.
Monitoring to the rescue
In order to address this, companies are looking towards proactive monitoring solutions. Companies using monitoring properly – as a managed service designed around their business and environment requirements – are seeing the benefit of this and it has allowed them to transition to new operating models more smoothly.
Monitoring generates visibility of the IT estate, its processes and how it interacts with the rest of the business. For example, when staff are struggling to access an application, is it an application problem, a network problem, an issue on user machines, or something else? Understanding not just what the problem is, but also the impact on business operations matters because it can save time and money. A proactive monitoring service can flag such issues before they have an impact on the business. Proper monitoring is a crucial factor when adapting to the new shape of a pandemic-impacted world.
IT organisations today can’t afford to not have a holistic view of every aspect of their environment. With users who might have been working in the same office now spread out in home offices, kitchens and bedrooms across an entire city or province, traditional monitoring and troubleshooting practices will simply not work.
“In order to have an accurate overview of the entire environment, it’s not just the tools you use, but how you use them that matters,” comments Dolbey.
"In the new world, the collection and analysis of the data generated by these monitoring systems has to be automated. Just like other managers are shifting their strategies and structures to meet new market demands, the way companies monitor their IT environment has to shift too. Embracing a managed service approach is critical in ensuring that the IT organisation is in a position to better support the rest of the business as they evolve."
That evolution can mean many things: the sudden need to work from home, a plan to adopt cloud, or to automate processes and flatten hierarchies. But the devil is in the details, and the only way to have visibility of that detail is through proper monitoring.
"The point of having good monitoring is that you don't have to worry about the nuts and bolts of the information you're getting," said Dolbey. "You can focus on reapplying that information at speed to adapt the organisation."
The pressure on IT organisations may seem unrelenting and it may appear impossible to gain clarity on what the future organisation will look like. At this point, visibility of your environment is going to be your greatest weapon and embracing proactive managed monitoring services will allow you to focus your attention on the areas of the business that matter.
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