December Solution Spotlight: Backstage Pass To Our Trade Secrets

While the Solution Spotlight series usually highlights a technology offered by one of our partners, in the December edition we elected to host a discussion of some of our most valued best practices for maintaining uptime.

Many people assume downtime is just a part of doing business. That no matter how well supported your IT environment is, it won’t always be up and running.

However, depending on who you talk to, that’s not necessarily the case. With the right practices in place (as explored in our latest Solutions Spotlight webinar) you can drastically limit downtime and deliver near-consistent uptime for your end-users.

Featuring Forthright Technology Partners’ Steve Zoberg, Frank Merino, and Matt McKinnon, this webinar explored a range of vital best practices for promoting 100% uptime. Check out the full recording to find out more about our most favored trade secrets:

The Problem: Ongoing IT Downtime

Downtime is an expensive and frustrating problem.

The main cost of downtime is not the fix itself, it’s the halt in your end-users’ productivity. If an IT-related or natural disaster occurs and takes critical systems offline, employees will be unable to complete their tasks, yet normal business expenses will carry on.

The economy of downtime is unforgiving – it grinds businesses to a halt, racks up expenses, and keeps you from getting anything done.

• Expense Vs. Revenue: During downtime, users incur all the expenses of running a business without the revenue you would usually generate.
• Loss of Focus: Even if downtime does not grind everything to a halt, some of the staff will have to divert themselves from their normal work to mitigate the problem – again reducing productivity.
• Affected Service Delivery: Furthermore, while systems are down, users can’t deliver services or sell products to current and potential new clients.
• Cost Of Repair: However you approach fixing the problem, it’ll cost time and money.

The Solution: Our Trade Secrets For 100% Uptime

The Forthright team breaks down uptime management into three key categories:

What You Need To Know

Uptime starts from a place of knowledge. In order to keep everything running smoothly, you need to know what you’re working with:

• Your Business: You need to have a clear understanding of your core business processes and practices, when they take place, and what they rely on.
• Your Tools: You need to have a detailed understanding of the line of business apps your team depends on for their work.
• When And What To Automate: You need to be able to identify repeat processes in system maintenance and management that can be automated so that they do not bottleneck at the personnel level.

What You Need To Have:

• Effective Change Management: You can’t simply have a basic schedule and approval process for effective change management. You need to have a clearly defined outcome to determine success in the change.
• Effective Problem Management: This is primarily a process of understanding causation. You need to understand why problems occur, so you can work to prevent them from occurring again later. The key here is to treat all problems, not just the big ones, as worthy of examination.
• Ability To Focus & Be Proactive: This is simply a matter of resources. Are you constantly running after problems as they crop up? Or can you get ahead of your work and maintain your systems proactively?
• What You Need To Achieve — Optimum Readiness State: At the end of the day, all of these processes have to be appropriately integrated, carried out, and tested so that you can achieve an Optimum Readiness State for your end-users.

We Will Help You Achieve 100% Uptime For Your End-Users

Want to see how these best practices work in action? 

They make up the foundation of our RunIT service, a user-based approach to support that, above all else, helps your end-users get work done. At the end of the day, IT should be a well-maintained and capable tool for the users, making them more productive and efficient.

Let us show you how:

• Contact the Forthright Technology Partners team and arrange a meeting at a time that works for you.
• Tell us about your downtime issues.
• Let us show you how our RunIT service and its many proven best practices will help to eliminate downtime and promote uptime for your end-users.