An Introduction to IT Support

When it comes to IT support your business is probably
looking for two things, you're looking to save operational costs,
especially in this current economic climate, and you're looking at
protecting and maximising the IT investment you've made to support your
business. Both of these objectives are easy to achieve so long as you
understand the criticality of the IT systems and components in relation
to the business. The higher the importance and criticality then the
higher the service level. The lower the importance and criticality then
the lower the service level. By taking this approach customers can
actually realize saving of up to 30% as apposed to a single service
level across the business. This is the smart approach to IT support.

The
smart approach to IT support means there are packages available for
every business, from the global corporation down to the small
businesses. Off the shelf, prepackaged, pre priced IT support is going
to be more suitable for some small businesses and it's available in
different service levels. If you've got a mission critical server that
you want covered, then you could get a committed or guaranteed service
which is straight of the shelf, and for a lower level of service, say
for a development or a test system, then a Monday to Friday, or a next
business day responses would be appropriate. The key is really to
understand your environment and assign the right level of service.

One
of the most significant changes in IT support in recent years is the
growing importance and dependence on remote support. Traditionally,
when customers had a hardware problem they'd call in an engineer, and
engineer would order a part and if they couldn't fix it, they'd maybe
get the senior engineer involved and this meant long down times for
customers. Remote support really turns that on it's head. It takes the
burden away from the customer site so the support translates into
higher availability for the customer.

Most IT systems these days
are built with a level of resilience, resilience is designed into it to
protect against critical business impact, but it's important to look at
what the implications are of an outage on the business, it's also
important to consider how systems and IT components interact with each
other regardless of manufacture. It's then a case of taking all this
information and creating a benchmark. Against your IT systems and
components, what support have you got in place today? Is it fit for
purpose? Can you identify any gaps that require addressing? The next
step is to get a align the service with the business critical
components making sure to remember software support because operating
system support is a key component in any IT systems, not only the
technical support but also all the non defect support so for business
critical environments, is it appropriate to have a service which
answers the 'how to' questions. There are tools available on the web
that can get you started with self assessment.

Everyone is trying
to save money at the moment, but your IT support is not a very
practical place to be frugal. The most significant risk is the
potential impact on the business, if you're using maintenance like an
insurance policy, then the chances are you don't want to use it, and
like an insurance policy, there are usually exclusions, so it's really
important to check what you're getting for your money, if there are
exclusions someone has to pick those exclusions up. So if you're
looking at a cheap maintenance deal, make sure you balance the risks
against the value of the IT systems and also the risk to your business.

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