“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke

Most organizations today are filled with advanced technology. Even the teams challenged to support it have trouble understanding it fully, and party as a result, it’s anything but magical. IT infrastructure is a jumble of different products that don’t integrate or interoperate, and are simply buggy, intrusive, and broken.

The trick for an IT services and support team is to find ways to make your technology work smoothly and seamlessly like magic. This means you need an IT services team that is:

Proactive

Waiting for problems to occur isn’t good enough. Infrastructure needs to be designed with capacity, performance, and security built-in from the start. Once the infrastructure is built, it needs round-the-clock monitoring that alerts the support team to developing problems—enabling them to respond before the problem fully materializes and impacts business operations. The team needs to stay on top of technology trends to know what patches and updates need to be applied and how new developments can make the infrastructure run even more efficiently and support the business even more effectively.

Related: Monitoring Lets You Be Reactive and Proactive, and You Need to be Both

Comprehensive

Organizations depend on technology that includes servers, desktop systems, mobile devices, networks, storage, and software. All these elements need to work together; viewing them and supporting them as isolated pieces misses the big picture and leads to integration problems and service outages. Your IT support team should be able to understand the full scope of your IT infrastructure, including your custom applications, and offer support for every layer. They should be able to scale solutions that work for a single department, division, or the entire organization.

Responsible

An effective IT support organization is always on call and on the job, 24×7. They consider themselves responsible for the entire infrastructure, not just pieces, and truly responsible support teams take ownership of all problems. If the team’s investigation shows that the problem needs to be fixed by a third party, they oversee the communication with the third party and make sure there’s a successful resolution. Service level objectives mean that goals are clear, and metrics are collected and reported so you know if the magic is working.

Prescient Solutions has almost 20 years’ experience helping companies overcome their IT challenges. Through our IT management, infrastructure support, and managed technology services, we apply our certified experts’ knowledge to addressing provide monitoring and support, help desk, and other services needed to keep infrastructure running smoothly. Our team’s expertise includes hardware, networks, operating systems, virtual environments, cloud, and applications like SharePoint and Hyperion, enabling us to understand and cope with a broad range of technical issues. Contact us for a free infrastructure assessment to uncover the shortcoming and vulnerabilities that make your IT all too unmagical and discuss how our services can help make those problems disappear.