The Changing Face of IT Network Maintenance

Challenging the concept of IT network and data management:
In an increasingly communications-led world, where IT underpins almost all business applications and processes, it is extremely surprising that many companies still only consider issues of IT data and network maintenance with a passing afterthought. Recent developments however, indicate that this approach is changing. Companies are beginning to understand that without efficient maintenance and optimisation, significant cost efficiencies can be incurred or the ROI on the headline business applications cannot be achieved – clearly impacting on the bottom line.
In line with this, customers are beginning to break away from the typical approach of maintenance based on response times to a position of availability. Contracts have begun to focus on levels of network downtime, enabling organisations to identify the costs incurred when key business processes are unable to function as required. For example do you know the cost of not being able to receive online sales, the cost for not being able to manufacture goods and what affect this could have on your reputation?
Response times are clearly important and should not be forgotten, but they don’t indicate the actual length of time required to fix the fault. As a result, a change to the overall service model is required to indicate that it is more than just engineering availability required to resolve incidents.