Impact of COVID 19 on IT Infrastructure & Shift in Priorities

So many aspects of our business & lives are under pressure right now due to the global pandemic.

In the middle of all this, IT infrastructure still remains the backbone of the smooth business operations.

Motadata is committed to helping individuals like you & your organization to get through these tough times.

We are in this together. We can do this together.

People in IT are always busy. Now your firefighters are working from home, you would not want to bother them for redundant tasks.

They must focus on the alarms that are critical. with smart event correlation it can all be skimmed & they can devote their time & efforts on the critical tasks.

There’s a blog on this topic, you may go through it to know how to reduce MTTR.

According to Info-Tech Research Group’s latest report on IT Infrastructure priorities, IT guys spend most of their valuable time in maintaining as well as administering existing IT systems — it is an important work, but certainly they can do better.

How? Well, there’s always more work to do, considering that IT leaders wish to grow as business grows.

Every IT guy wishes to provide meaningful value to their Managers.

This blog highlights how 100s of different businesses have approached this pandemic situation, what they have chosen to prioritize, & some of the most common themes as well as implications.

As we continue to cope up with the ruckus, infrastructure roles evolve to solve new business challenges, a change in skillset, mindset, & existing technology deployed will become crucial to success of today’s businesses.

Ultimately, understanding how changes in patterns of work stand to impact the day-to-day lives of your IT staff will allow you to smartly deal with the current situation.

We understand that it is too soon to predict the next steps, it has only been weeks and we are trying to get used to the newer ways to work.

We want to ensure that you are spending your crucial time right. Use your data to validate. Prioritize things for your IT and implement accordingly.

Prepare your IT for the Remote Work

This definitely isn’t a drill, it is happening for real.

While your employees are hustling to keep the business running, as their manager you must ensure that this process is smooth for them.

Make WFH experience a productive one for your employee by ensuring that your applications which are supporting your business operations are running smoothly.

There is no load on any of your servers. The cloud infra is up & running.

Make sure that you don’t hear about any service being down from any of your customers.

Rather monitor it in real time using a network monitoring tool & prevent that from happening.

There are some steps that you can take to make this transition of working from home smooth for your IT.

1. Secure your IT 

Constantly monitor logs to ensure that there is no suspicious activity.

Ensure that the files that are confidential are not being accessed with the help of log management.

Reporting mechanisms should not stop (if you had it in place). If not then make sure you implement one now.

Send daily/ weekly reports to IT managers about the state of your IT infrastructure. With smart network monitoring tools you can automate this process and save time.

2. Smart Capacity Planning

Adjust capacity of your network to meet the most critical infrastructure needs.

Press a pause button on all of the non-critical IT problems and spend time on the ones that require attention.

In case if you are still working in your office, you might want to save the bandwidth.

Considering the bandwidth choke down in a lot of scenarios. You can avoid that from happening with network traffic monitoring and flow management.

3. Remote Monitoring

Make sure that all of your remote sites have their Infrastructure running smoothly with distributed monitoring.

You can monitor all of your remote sites sitting at home with the help of remote polling engines (remote monitoring).

No virus, nothing in fact can stop you from maintaining your IT infrastructure. You just need to have the right tools in place.

How Motadata can help

1. Smoothly transition to Remote Working

Now, we are entering a world where working from home will be the new normal for at least the foreseeable future.

Distributing the tasks within subordinates and managing effectively will be the key for the business managers.

Manage your remote working with the next generation ‘Motadata ServiceOps’ tool which is ITIL compliant ITSM tool for your staff/technicians to work and collaborate remotely with efficient inbuilt ‘workflow’ engine.

Motadata’s NMS can also be accessed and managed remotely. It can give deep insights of all the layers of infrastructure from one console.

2. Ensure that you fulfill the commitment made to your customer

As an organization, we are committed to the highest level of service to our customers. This can be done easily with our highly efficient ‘SLA Monitoring’ tools.

With the effective SLA measurements and out-of-the box SLA reports, you can bolster confidence of your customers about your ability to deliver the service.

You still do not want to miss out on any SLAs. Make sure that happens with SLA management.

3. Ensure that your backbone infrastructure is always on

Network administrators across the globe are under tremendous pressure, as there is an unprecedented surge in the network traffic.

To ensure that the business runs smoothly, your data centers, and overall infra should be monitored effectively and proactively.

With proven monitoring solutions like ‘Motadata NMS’, you can effectively monitor your environment and check for alarm conditions so you can act or report effectively when needed.

4. Effective utilization of your existing network

During these times, it is important that not only your network is up and running but it is also utilized wisely & effectively.

Standard Monitoring tells you that the interface on your router is passing what amount of traffic.

But who is using that traffic? What kind of data is being passed?

Motadata’s flow monitoring tool assists businesses with interface utilization reports along with insights of which applications or protocols are consuming most of the traffic.

These out-of-the box reports and dashboards will help the network administrators for effective capacity planning.

5. Save time in understanding the tool, rather understand the network digitize your IT

This is the high time you protect and monitor your network infrastructure so you can focus on your core business.

If you are going to use Monitoring tool for the first time, or you are already using monitoring tool but want to go for more advanced tools which are easy to configure and takes less time to launch then Motadata is the answer.

It is easy to configure and installs quickly. Its dashboard has easy to use widgets with drag and drop features and you can make your own customized dashboard in no time.

6. Embracing automation with service catalogue

IT teams must be flooded with lots of emails which are hard to maintain.

With Motadata’s Service Catalogue (ITSM) where all the IT related services like hardware acquisition, requesting for any software license, etc.

can be created and all the services can be streamlined through approval workflows, auto assignment of tickets among the IT team as per the workload.

All these services can be requested by end-users through Motadata ITSM mobile application.

They can also communicate with technicians over mobile app which reduces the overall workload on the technician.

7. Utilise Centralised Knowledge-Base Repository

Since we all are working from home and are not available face to face so it becomes difficult for us to call someone every time for every little issue.

So, in the Knowledge Base module of Motadata ITSM, the concerned departments can create certain Articles/FAQs which can be accessed by the whole organization so the users can resolve their basic concerns by themselves.

If you are still hiring and on-boarding new members to your IT team then make the knowledge transfer process faster with knowledge management from any ITSM tool.

Mostly technicians contribute to the KB center and post articles of how they solved a critical problem.

Newcomers can go through it and can learn from other’s experience which senior management can focus on key tasks.

For eg – IT team can create basic articles on troubleshooting, HR team can create or upload  FAQs on HR Policies, Leave Policy details, Admin can create an article on the reimbursement procedure.

8. Manage your Assets Remotely

Since employees moved to their hometown in this lockdown, they also took away the assets allocated to them.

To ensure no asset goes missing, the IT team can maintain the Inventory details and can assign respected users with the assets.

So, when the lockdown is lifted up and everyone is back to the office it is ensured that no asset is lost.