2018 has arrived, and many IT professionals likely are hard at work mapping out their incident management strategies for the new year. As IT professionals search for ways to limit downtime and outages in 2018, it may be best to understand which key trends are worth watching in the months to come.
To help you prepare for the new year, let’s take a look at three incident management predictions for 2018.
- Business leaders will prioritize automation.
Few business leaders have significant time and resources at their disposal. Meanwhile, the costs associated with incident management are on the rise, a trend that appears likely to continue in the foreseeable future.
Let’s not forget about the shortage of talented IT professionals available to businesses, either. Global employers rank IT roles among the most difficult jobs to fill, according to a survey of 42,300 companies conducted by workforce solutions provider ManpowerGroup. Companies big and small constantly compete for top talent, and today’s business leaders must find innovative ways to differentiate their respective organizations from the competition. Otherwise, business leaders risk missing out on top talent, which may cause their respective companies to fall behind rivals.
Ultimately, automation can help business leaders reduce the risk of downtime and outages without breaking their budgets. Incident management software with automatic escalation capabilities, for example, allows IT professionals to set up workflows to automatically escalate alerts to a manager after a set period of time – even while on-call staff members are still being alerted. This ensures fast, efficient incident response and enables IT professionals to further minimize the risk of lengthy downtime and outages.
2. Collaboration will drive the top businesses.
A recent Stanford University study revealed individuals who work together reported higher engagement levels, lower fatigue levels and higher overall success rates than those who worked alone. This indicates collaboration is paramount, particularly for IT professionals who want to achieve the best-possible results.
Collaboration may serve as a top priority for departments across a business, including incident management. In fact, IT professionals who work together may be better equipped than ever before to stop incidents before they happen.
Of course, collaboration and communication go hand-in-hand. Without the right communication platforms in place, IT professionals are unlikely to accomplish their day-to-day goals.
An alert management system that promotes real-time collaboration and communication could make or break a company’s incident management strategy. And if IT professionals can quickly and effortlessly keep one another up to date in a crisis, they should have no trouble working together to resolve an incident.
3. Role-based security will come into focus.
Insider threats are becoming major problems for businesses around the globe. Yet few companies understand what it takes to identify and address such issues.
In 2018, role-based security may come into play. If businesses can track employee activities across internal systems, these companies can hold workers accountable for their actions. Perhaps most important, companies that deploy role-based security measures can learn about assorted security threats and take the necessary steps to prevent these problems from escalating.
Role-based security is an important feature to consider relative to incident management software too. The ideal alert management software makes it simple to assign IT professionals to specific security roles as needed. That way, business leaders can leverage this software to limit user actions based on their roles, receive notifications any time user security changes are made and much more.
2018 should be a year to remember for all the right reasons. However, subpar incident management software can put a major strain on a company’s time and resources. The software may even cause IT professionals to miss important alerts related to downtime, outages and other critical incidents.
Don’t let critical incidents get the best of your business in 2018 and beyond. Deploy an effective incident management and alerting system today, and your company can get the help it needs to control critical incidents before they get out of hand.
