Committing to 100% uptime for your charity's IT
Technology is transforming the charity sector and revolutionising its methods of fundraising and generating awareness. Whether it’s through IT management of events to drum up support, social networking to spread the word or provision of more convenient ways to donate, technology is becoming inextricably tied into the foundations of a charity’s core existence, resulting in an increasing reliance that requires more and more maintenance.
Simultaneously, IT managers of charities have to contend with a growing number of connected devices and a greater reliance on more complex, broader ranging applications. But the truth is, while IT managers are busily migrating into the cloud, going mobile and facilitating new ways of flexible working, most are relying on an IT systems management approach incapable of successfully governing the management of IT.
In an increasingly digital age, the traditional break/fix model of IT management is simply no longer good enough. Instead, charities need to embrace a predictive environment that delivers 100% uptime, or they run significant risks of diminishing donations that, in the context of persistent budget cuts and increasing competition, they simply can’t afford to take.
But quite apart from the reputational problems with IT failure, including when charities are operating under outsourced public service contracts, there are the resilience requirements under SORP and by the Charity Commission. IT failure can lead to a whole range of negative consequences. Effective IT systems management for charities isn't just an operational necessity; it is essential to meeting both the spirit and rules of charity sector compliance.
Proactive is reactive
Many charities are taking advantage of the web and mobile technologies to ensure giving remains both convenient and compelling to a tech-savvy society. The problem, however, is that in a number of cases new connected devices are added to the IT network without true consideration of the impact they might have on the overall infrastructure. The result is a potential lack of governance which could lead to serious security concerns, downtime and constrained decision-making.
The use of real time monitoring to flag such potentially business impacting IT issues before they occur is now a standard Managed Service Provider (MSP) service. Yet, while knowing that network capacity is at 90% or email levels are approaching capacity before the infrastructure hits critical may reduce the likelihood of massive failure, just how much business value does this really deliver?
The reality is that when the MSP calls to say key thresholds have been breached and alarm bells are ringing, an IT manager has no option but to react; to make an immediate investment to address the problem and avoid downtime. Such panic buying is never going to be cost effective – nor will it tie in to any strategic plan. It will certainly result in an unplanned spike in costs.
A little bit of network monitoring may stop a major outage but it still feeds a reactive IT strategy managed on the basis that services will be available 99.999% of the time, when the stark reality in today’s environment is that only 100% uptime will do.
This is not just a question of semantics either. No charity can afford to lose a morning of inbound and outbound calls while a hardware failure is resolved, or to find its existing infrastructure has no room to accommodate a proposed increase in staff or volunteer numbers, ultimately impeding future growth. The break/fix approach that still dominates in most charity IT environments is simply not acceptable for these critical components and there is no tolerance for failure.
No time for downtime
With today’s hybrid environment, charities need to use IT and telephony effectively all the time. They need to exploit collaboration with donors and enable employees and volunteers to be productive irrespective of location.
This is a quantum leap in IT consumption – and it needs to be reflected by a quantum leap in IT service and support. Success should be a measure of the actual day to day user experience, essentially the provider’s ability to work with internal IT resource to prevent those telephony problems or router issues before they occur.
At the heart of both of these changes is information – the use of real time monitoring of every aspect of the IT and telephony infrastructure that can be analysed and assessed to predict requirements well in advance and, critically, be presented in a simple to comprehend fashion to deliver valuable business insight.
While there is no one monitoring system that can deliver this view, the successful interaction of multiple, separate tools overlaid with a business intelligence layer can create a predictive environment that transforms the way the infrastructure is assessed and managed on both a day to day and strategic basis.
Predicting uptime
To achieve this 100% uptime, the newest breed of Managed Service Providers use intelligent monitoring to predict potential failures before they occur – and replace the relevant component to avoid any downtime. This is hardly a new approach: this predictive model has been successfully deployed for years in any number of industries from aeronautics to Formula 1. Individual components are continuously monitored for any signs of potential weakness – and intelligently replaced during planned downtime to avoid any unplanned failures or glitches in performance.
This small but growing minority of IT organisations has also begun to explore the value of consolidating monitoring tools to move beyond break/fix to a predictive model that delivers 100% uptime. Combining trends in performance with business plans can predict potential issues six, 12, even 18 months in advance, giving the charity time to cost, assess options and plan.
This is a continual process of refinement that not only prevents issues occurring but essentially levels out the spend. There are no peaks and troughs, the charity has a flat-line, controlled IT expenditure and, critically, the opportunity to realise real productivity gains through more intelligent, well managed use of technology. With clear insight into IT and telephony performance, it is far easier to have highly intelligent, meaningful conversations about the strategic direction and opportunities for planned investment.
Furthermore, combining in-depth and real time understanding of the entire infrastructure with self-healing technologies enables the preventative measures that fundamentally transform users’ day to day experience with technology. Rather than hoping the fix will occur within the Service Level Agreement (SLA), problems can be routinely addressed to avoid interruption.
Weighing up the risk
For all charities, IT outage in an era of 24x7 operations, mobile users and online business models is incredibly damaging and expensive. Given the speed with which technology is becoming increasingly vital to facilitating donations, stimulating future growth and adhering to compliance in the charity sector, there is no time to delay.
The role of IT is evolving to encompass every aspect, amidst more complicated applications and millions of connected devices, and effective IT utilisation requires far more than the proactive support model that dominates today. Predicting the problems that may occur or business needs that may arise well ahead of time is key to achieving healthy IT in a charity. After all, when every aspect of the infrastructure is so critical, can any charity really afford for failure to occur before swinging into action?
