Modern IT environments are typically complex creations with multiple moving parts. In a perfect world, a well-architected infrastructure and application stack would always run efficiently, supporting business-critical systems and maintaining customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, all IT professionals know that no environment is immune to unexpected problems that reduce its effectiveness.
The way your business addresses potential or actual issues in your IT environment directly affects your business. Companies basically have two broad options when developing their support strategy. They can either take a reactive or a proactive approach. We suggest that adopting a reactive strategy will cost your business more than you think.
What is Reactive IT?
Reactive IT is an approach to IT management that focuses on responding to problems rather than taking informed actions to prevent them. Teams concentrate on fixing failures and troubleshooting issues to restore service as quickly as possible and minimize disruptions to internal operations and customer-facing systems. This mindset may be referred to as a break-fix strategy.
Teams practicing reactive IT typically operate with the following workflow.
- An issue that impacts a production system or service occurs unexpectedly. At this point, the support team is often unaware that users are experiencing a problem.
- Users or customers report issues ranging from degraded performance to the unavailability of crucial systems.
- Team members now must scramble to identify and investigate the problem, a process that can take significant time and seriously impact the environment.
- Once the problem is isolated, the team must decide the best way to fix it. They may be forced to choose a quick fix over the optimal approach to minimize downtime.
- The team restores the affected services and is satisfied that the issue has been addressed. Little or no further action is taken to prevent its recurrence.
Companies with a reactive approach to IT management often display the following characteristics.
- Systems are monitored inconsistently or not at all, so teams miss the warning signs of looming problems.
- Problems are addressed only after a failure or disruption occurs, with no preventive maintenance or tactics in place. For example, companies may have weak or nonexistent capacity planning or patching procedures.
- Teams must spend substantial time manually troubleshooting and correcting the issues.
- Team members often face urgent support tickets that must be addressed promptly to maintain business functionality.
What Are the Risks and Costs of a Reactive IT Approach?
Companies expose themselves to multiple risks and unnecessary costs when they adopt a reactive IT approach.
- Increased downtime: Businesses risk excessive, unexpected downtime, undermining their ability to meet customer demand.
- Higher operational costs: Team members may be called upon to work unscheduled, costly overtime or replace equipment at premium prices to minimize downtime.
- Security vulnerabilities: A reactive patching strategy leaves security vulnerabilities ripe for exploitation by threat actors.
- Degraded user experience: Internal users and external customers experience degraded system performance, resulting in reduced satisfaction with the IT environment.
- IT staff overload: IT team members may be overloaded and experience burnout in a reactive environment that requires immediate action to resolve problems.
A few examples of the ramifications of reactive IT clearly illustrate these risks.
- Teams replace a failing server or system after it crashes. The system failure affects a business-critical service, resulting in an extended outage that impacts customers and immediately leads to lost revenue. Inopportune outages may also cause dissatisfied customers to seek new solutions, leading to long-term damage to the business.
- A company is hit by a ransomware attack on a critical system, disrupting operations and customer satisfaction. Teams must develop ad hoc recovery procedures that slow service restoration. They may also now be motivated to patch the specific vulnerability that permitted the attack, but not extend this practice to other potential targets.
- Employees may find they cannot process incoming orders due to insufficient storage space. IT teams must quickly allocate more storage to avoid an extended outage. This solution may involve purchasing more expensive storage options, which affects the company’s bottom line.
- Customer demand overwhelms network capacity, leading to significantly degraded performance and outages of a vital ecommerce platform. Companies may have to pay a premium for additional bandwidth and will almost certainly lose customers to other, more efficient solutions.
Companies may continue practicing reactive IT for several reasons, including:
- Limited IT budgets;
- Small teams or inadequate skill sets;
- Lack of monitoring tools;
- Legacy infrastructure that cannot support modern business requirements.
How Can You Reduce These Costs With a Proactive Strategy?
Businesses can limit their risks and reduce the costs associated with reactive IT by adopting a more proactive strategy. A proactive approach has multiple characteristics that make it a more effective way to manage an IT environment.
A focus on prevention
Teams concentrate on preventing problems rather than reacting to them. They implement predictive and preventive maintenance to ensure infrastructure health, including a strict patching schedule that quickly addresses known vulnerabilities.
Monitoring
Companies deploy monitoring solutions that provide vital information regarding the environment’s performance and available capacity. Decision-makers can leverage this data to address approaching shortages and bottlenecks before they cause disruptions.
Strategic planning
Companies should engage in strategic planning that addresses prospective growth and the eventual obsolescence of existing solutions. Businesses can take actions such as replacing old equipment or migrating to a cloud platform to plan for the future successfully.
Automation and optimization
Businesses can automate IT processes such as backups and capacity alerting to eliminate potential human error. Companies with limited in-house resources can engage a trusted third party to manage and optimize their environment.
How do VAST Services Support a Proactive Approach?
We fully support taking a proactive approach to IT management. Reactive IT will always be necessary to address natural disasters and human error, but our services can help you proactively protect your IT environment and your business. Examples of services that support proactive IT management include:
- VAST View offers a comprehensive solution for managing and optimizing the benefits of your cloud environment.
- Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) provides immutable backups and a streamlined recovery path to protect against ransomware and other cyberattacks.
- Our managed services help small and medium-sized businesses proactively address their on-premises and public cloud IT environments.
Contact us today and learn how we can help you adopt a proactive approach for your company’s IT management.
