Reduce IT downtime with incident management

In the IT world, if a server can fail or traffic can overload the network – it will. And the consequences of downtime are significant. Many IT organizations face database, hardware, and software downtime that last short periods or can shut down the business for days. According to Gartner, the average cost of network downtime alone is $5,600 per minute. What measures can organizations take to reduce IT downtime?

Downtime issues are often detected by monitoring tools, which send out alerts using email or SMS. Since employees are inundated with hundreds of other emails and dozens of SMS message each day, there’s a good chance that a critical incident alert will get lost in the noise. The whole point of monitoring is to be alerted to issues before they worsen, so when speed is of the essence, IT organizations need a better alerting solution.

Best practices for effective incident management during downtime

When reviewing incident management processes, consider five best practices:

Avoid missing critical alerts – Any system that sends off an email notification should be integrated with an alerting app that sends a loud, unique, impossible-to-ignore alarm via smartphone. No more missing alerts in the sea of emails!

Automate the alert and on-call schedules – An automated scheduling system ensures that alerts instantly get to the right person every time. An automated system has two key advantages; an alert can instantly be routed to a team or individual based on severity and subject matter, and the schedule can be quickly adjusted for changes in personnel and available hours.

Use alert escalations – An escalation policy organizes team members into escalation groups, determines who should receive an alert, sets the amount of time to wait before escalating to the next person, and who is next in line to receive the alert if the first person does not respond immediately.

Notify those who need to know quickly – A mass notification feature lets IT teams quickly and easily update a predetermined group of customer contacts before, during and following any type of potential threats, crisis events, or scheduled downtime.

Impact of having a solid incident management process in place

Proper incident notification not only reduces IT downtime and costs, it ensures a company’s good standing. If an organization frequently experiences noticeable downtime, its reputation suffers among customers and the broader industry. This translates into higher churn, a weaker competitive position and lower revenues. In today’s environment, businesses cannot afford to ignore downtime incidents.

Find out how OnPage can help your team reduce IT downtime

For the past eight years OnPage has lead the charge in helping organizations reduce downtime. We ensure that IT teams’ alerts are never missed so they can minimize downtime, improve their ability to meet SLAs and deliver superior, reliable service to their customers.

To learn more, check out our e-book, Can Your Business Affort IT Downtime?