Do you know IT incidents cost companies millions of dollars each year? Even bigger issue is that they are difficult to predict and often lead to costly downtimes and the staff sitting idle. One of the biggest challenges during these IT incidents is collaborating between teams about what happened and fixing the issue. Incident inefficiencies during this stage have a significant impact on your business.
In this blog, we will discuss these incident inefficiencies in detail and how you can prevent them.
How Much Do IT Incidents Cost?
An average IT incident costs several thousand dollars in a minute. It means an average of five major IT incidents lasting about six hours will cost you about million dollars in a year.
Although the cost may vary based on factors like team size, direct/indirect costs, and the impact of the IT incident.
This Challenge Magnifies When Your Team is Fragmented
Fragmented teams often complicate IT incidents. They result in panic, confusion, and complexity. The MTTR (Mean Time to Recover) increases as more time is required to solve the problems because the needed resources pile up.
That’s why resolving conflicts within your team should be your top priority. You can begin with the following questions:
- Do you have an updated record of your critical services?
- Do you have prioritized these services according to the business criticality?
- Are you aware of the downstream and upstream dependencies of these services?
- Were you able to identify the crucial application and infrastructure elements in your environment?
- Are you aware of the changes your team is making to the applications and the infrastructure?
- Are there any monitoring gaps you need to bridge?
- Which monitoring tools can offer you the best value?
These questions will help you analyze your team and overcoming the fragmentation issues. You can even integrate IT service management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) to achieve full-stack visibility and streamlined processes within the organization.
How to Resolve Incident Inefficiencies
The right combination of tools, people, and processes is the right way to resolve incident inefficiencies. Here are two approaches you can follow:
1. Set Up an Incident Management Team
The incident management team will help you quickly get back on track when IT incidents happen. You can build it from your existing staff. It will have the following three crucial roles:
The Incident Managers
Incident managers announce an IT incident and take full responsibility for it. It’s their job to ensure that you prevent IT incidents on time and there is no unnecessary wastage of resources.
The NOC/Monitoring Team
The NOC/Monitoring team will be your front line of defense. It will be the first to react whenever things go south, and an IT incident will happen. The NOC/monitoring team will also oversee reporting the IT incident and create full situational awareness of the incident command with the help of bidirectional communication.
The Production Support Team
The production support team takes necessary actions to curb the IT incident and ensure minimum damage.
2. Deploy event co-relation and automation tools
The event co-relation and automation will help you assist the incident management team in preventing IT inefficiencies. Here is how you can do that:
Step 1: Match the alerts created by the monitoring and observability tools into insight-rich incidents using AI and machine learning. Once done, you can add context to these incidents by understanding the topology resources. It will help you create full-stack visibility and awareness of the situation for your incident management team.
Step 2: Find the root cause of the IT incidents using AI & ML. Also, match them with data streams from CI/CD, change management, orchestration, and auditing to see if any changes in the environment resulted in the IT incident.
Step 3: Finally, automate as many processes as you can to free your IT Ops team from manual, time-consuming tasks. By integrating with collaboration tools, you can also enable the above-mentioned bidirectional communications.
In a Nutshell
IT incidents can cost a lot, especially if you don’t know how to deal with them. That is why it’s essential to take necessary measures and control them on time. Hopefully, the blog gave you an idea of how you can prevent incident efficiencies and ensure maximum productivity.
Still, if you need guidance, our DevOps experts are always ready to help. Talk to us about getting started.
