Here we go again. If 2022 wasn’t enough, there are new challenges in 2023 staring right at information technology leaders. As interest rates rise and consumer demand slows, companies plan to cut costs and do more with less. But what does all this mean for you? Amid this uncertainty, the IT operations department must adapt well to these changes. Because if they don’t, the business they support will be disadvantaged.
Unable to send, receive, or search email through Exchange Online? Microsoft Outlook suffered an outage for several hours last night, disrupting North America and worldwide email services.
Traditionally, we consider IT to be managing and monitoring on-premises network infrastructure, including hardware and software. However, the reality is that most enterprises have accepted and migrated much of their infrastructure to the cloud already. They recognize the benefits of the cloud and that it is here for the long haul. According to the latest study from Deloitte, 90% of organizations have been using cloud services for the last three years, and 79% are hosting workloads with multiple cloud providers. In addition, adopting cloud computing platforms has accelerated significantly in the remote work era.
Microsoft had its corporate earnings call yesterday and posted weaker guidance. But guess what? Several hours later, the tech giant was hit by a networking outage that took down Azure and other services like Teams and Outlook, affecting millions of users globally.
If you have been following the news over the last few months, you will agree that the buzzwords for this year are – inflation and recession. Yet, even in these turbulent times, delivering an excellent digital employee experience (DEX) remains an essential aspect of IT. As organizations continue to add various collaboration, communication, and end-user technologies to the mix, new problems will surface.
Bandwidth monitoring provides IT administrators with the assurance that the network has sufficient capacity to run business-critical applications. In addition, network ops team have end-to-end visibility to identify network hogs that cause the congestion. Typically, when a single component overloads in any network, it can bring the entire operation to its knees and impact the employee digital experience. For example, even if you may have a dedicated service plan from your ISP, employees will end up complaining about issues like large file transfer time and slower applications.
Gartner predicts that spending on public cloud services will rise to 21% in 2023. Most organizations today support fully remote operations and use SaaS services from the cloud. But is your Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) tool suitable for monitoring mission-critical services like Microsoft 365? Don't get us wrong - SCOM is a comprehensive monitoring tool for servers, infrastructure, and apps such as Exchange and SQL. However, the recently released Microsoft SCOM Management Pack for monitoring Microsoft 365 lacks clout.
Think about the last time your IT systems had an outage: How did your team react to it? Were they organized with a clear idea of how best to resolve the issue? Or was it chaotic, with people firing questions from all directions and customer service channels ablaze with requests for help? Digital technology disruptions are typical (and even expected) at the workplace, but it doesn’t have to be chaotic, with teams rushing around to extinguish the metaphoric fire.
