Traditional business hours are typically described at 8am to 5pm, Monday through Friday, so traditionally, IT service providers have worked those hours, or what’s known as “9×5” in shorthand.
However, as business needs have changed, 24-hour-a-day access to support, 7 days a week, for all 365 days of the year, or what’s known as “24/7/365”, has moved from being nice to have, to need to have, to must have.
Some of the leading drivers of this change include:
According to a report by Cisco, 94 percent of workloads and compute instances are processed by cloud data centers with only 6 percent processed by traditional data centers. With availability of access 24/7/365, users have often extended their access to early mornings, evenings, and weekends, and when issue occur, help is needed not at the start of the next business day, but when the user is trying to work. In addition, it’s not just users trying to access that data – it’s often cybercriminals, so in addition to 24/7/365 help desk, 24/7/365 security management resources are needed as well.
One of the results of moving key IT business systems to the cloud is that access is often available from anywhere at any time. Those companies that adopted cloud access early where best prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic and shifted to a work-from-home model with ease, while those that hadn’t mentioned a significant increase in cloud spend due to COVID-19, according to a survey from Flexera. Juggling work life and home life in the same space often meant working at odd hours when home life didn’t interfere. Access to support needed to occur when work happens, which is not just during those traditional business hours.
Even pre-pandemic, there were certain industries who tend to work either a 24/7/365 schedule, or at minimum, tend to be early risers in terms of when their IT access begins each day. For example, many manufacturing companies and hospitals have required 24/7/365 access for decades, or at minimum would begin production or seeing patients at 8am sharp, meaning the staff getting the facility setup for a productive day was starting their day much earlier. What happens when technology issues get in their way?
One such example happened recently to a Sourcepass manufacturing client, so we’ll let them tell you the story in their own words:
“Our system was down, and we could not send a ticket. I called the main number before 7:00am and was able to quickly talk to the tech support attendant. She verified the server issue. Within 1/2 hour, Pete from tech support was able to connect to a secondary server and address the problem on the main servers. He had us back up within 5 minutes. Nice work.”
When your business reaches the point of needing 24/7/365 support, you should work with a company with an always-on attitude who is truly accessible around the clock – and not a company with a disgruntled on-call team member cursed by the phone praying that it doesn’t ring at 2am.
David Malangone is a Sourcepass Director of Service. Reach out to David at (877) 678-8080.