Four Things You Need To Do Before Your Next Outage

Can you guess when your next outage will be?

Over half of the companies that participated in our service availability survey had an outage in the past 3 months, and over a quarter had an outage in the past month.

On average, organizations are able to detect and address just 57% of the critical IT issues before they adversely impact the business, our most recent IT Operations Analytics survey shows. And although 89% ranked uptime as the most important KPI for IT operations, 51% of the respondents also ranked it as one of the most difficult KPIs to meet.

Evidently, if you do nothing differently, you could very well become part of the statistics for the companies that will be impacted by an outage in the upcoming months.

So What’s Missing?

Given that these companies have already invested a great deal of money in implementing top-tier infrastructure, replication, and high availability technologies to avoid outages, we must ask ourselves what’s missing. According to our survey results, proactive identification of risks is the top challenge IT organizations face in ensuring service availability. Other challenges mentioned include change management and cross-domain/cross-team coordination.

While there is no silver bullet, here are four best practices that successful IT organizations are putting in place to meet these challenges.

1. Converged Infrastructure Visibility

Cross-domain visibility is a must-have in the converged infrastructure era. To clearly understand what puts service availability at risk, it is essential to have complete visibility into up-to-date configuration information from servers and clusters, storage devices, virtual infrastructure, database servers, and the networks that connect them across physical, virtual, and hybrid environments.

2. Predictive Analytics

The information collected from your IT infrastructure is only as helpful as your ability to process the data and turn it into actionable insight. Predictive IT Operations Analytics enable IT organizations to identify single-points-of-failure and misconfigurations that can lead to outages across all IT layers.

3. Early Warning Alerts and Notifications

Transforming IT operations from firefighting to prevention mode allows IT teams to proactively address potential configuration failures and eliminate the underlying downtime risks before they impact critical business services.

4. Measurement and KPI Tracking

Beyond day-to-day outage prevention, successful IT organizations put in place metrics and KPIs that allow management to see the big picture—analyze risk trends, track the performance of the various IT teams, and make smarter decisions to optimize IT operations.

I’m sure these findings are not catching you by surprise. The converged enterprise architecture is extremely complex. The pace of change continues to escalate. It’s really no wonder that IT teams are having a hard time keeping up.

Learn how IT operations can keep up with the velocity of change in our eBook on Agile IT Operations.