Most organizations rely on their network infrastructure to support business processes.
When your system goes down, it's likely your business does too. Successful organizations typically have an IT alerting system in place to assist in these situations. Through an IT alert system, you can detect and mitigate network issues fast, reducing the potential for time-consuming and costly business disruptions.
However, many IT managers are pressed for time due to the high demands placed upon them and not enough staff. Allocating resources and staying within budget are common challenges at the top of many managers’ lists. Manual IT alerting systems are too time-consuming and inefficient, so oftentimes organizations find themselves trying to force fit a solution designed for emergency notifications into a tool for complex IT incident management. Unfortunately, this isn’t a good way to handle IT incident alerts and escalations. Piecemeal solutions don’t deliver when it comes to efficiency, quality or customer support.
A dedicated IT alert system will deliver robust features to support the growing complexity of organizations today. Let’s break it down into the top five functions of IT alerting system software:
- Activation of response teams
- Automated alerts
- Geo-targeted alert functions
- Detailed reporting capabilities
- Integration capabilities
Activate Incident Response
An IT alerting system is able to quickly distribute important messages throughout the enterprise. Fast notification means your IT department can get on the job — and get your system running as soon as possible. With IT alerting, your organization's key personnel can all be notified of an incident or outage at once. Then staff who have the skill sets and access to correct the problem can begin to work on it immediately. Organizations can empower IT staff to react swiftly should an event occur, while also maintaining open lines of communication and transparency with stakeholders across departments.
Automate Alerts
Instead of devoting IT resources to monitoring systems and processes, automated notification can do the job for you. When events occur, automated alerts are sent to the appropriate staff — taking into account whether they’re on duty, on call or out of office — so recipients can quickly fix problems before they cause downtime or delays. Automated alerting has proven to be an invaluable tool for incident management, quickly delivering a recognizable return on investment by reducing response times for IT incidents. These benefits aren’t unique to the IT department — they can provide great value when extended throughout the enterprise. Ultimately, automated alerts help streamline business operations, increase efficiency and enhance productivity.
Reach Staff Wherever They Are
What happens when your system goes down after hours? Do you have on-call IT staff? Will anyone notice your system has gone down before the next day? Through an IT alerting system, you’re able to connect with staff members through phone, SMS, email, landlines or other preferred methods — wherever they’re located. This improves the chances your incident response teams will receive a timely alert, so they can begin working to mitigate damages immediately.
Increase Future Proficiency with Reports
Documentation provides critical guidance for companies before, during and after an incident occurs. Track what happened, who is responding, what steps have been taken (or still need to be) and every step in between. This functionality offers two things for your organization. One, it delivers assistance while an incident is occurring through a single interface for information on actions taken and their results. Two, it provides after-action reports for auditing and analysis that will assist with improving your team’s processes moving forward.
Leverage Integration Capabilities
Today’s IT environments aren’t what they used to be. They’ve become much more complex. With that complexity comes a whole new range of demands on IT managers — not the least of which is the need to do more without adding new resources. To address the growing demand for services, teams must rely on tools to support IT service management (ITSM) initiatives within the organization. Many IT departments improve uptime with advanced IT alerting software integrated with ITSM and network management systems (NMS). But how do these integrations work?
OnSolve IT Alerting Solutions
Integrated IT Alerting from OnSolve delivers two key advantages: It saves resources and it speeds up response time by reducing the number of enterprise tools required for successful outcomes.
OnSolve delivers one award-winning Critical Communications system so you can reach everyone effectively, in every circumstance. Activate your response teams without human intervention or the risk of human error. Remove manual processes for a faster and more focused response. Receive detailed reports and track all events in real time, including a post-event audit trail for maximum transparency and process improvement. The entire system dovetails with your existing software, so you can start using the system right away. Eliminate manual overrides and patchwork.
Whether it’s daily operations or an IT incident, with OnSolve you have the features you need to achieve your objectives. Integration means they all work hand-in-hand to help you recover faster and achieve better outcomes. Now you can strengthen your organizational resilience through a seamless and intuitive process.
To learn more, check out our brochure, OnSolve IT Alerting: Minimize Business Downtime and Accelerate Incident Response.
