Modern-day entrepreneurs and IT management frequently repeat an admonition popular in and beyond Silicon Valley: “fail fast.” The thinking behind the words? Build it, ship it, learn from how it fails, and make it better. You’ll get to success faster than you would by building it, then testing it repeated times before shipping it.
Why IT Can’t and Shouldn’t Ever Fail Fast
With IT, the goal, whether expressed or implied, is exactly the opposite. IT needs to “succeed fast” with every new deployment or upgrade. Any failures must be brief, limited in scope, and resolved quickly to minimize risk to the business. Even if those failures are caused by outside threats.
Those risks can be significant, according to National Cyber Security Alliance research reported in May 2017 by Inc.com. The Alliance found as many as 60 percent of hacked small and mid-sized businesses go out of business within six months of a successful cyber attack.
Skill Shortages Delay IT Successes
Exacerbating the challenges to IT, of succeeding quickly and avoiding failure, is a lack of resources. Skilled, experienced staff are scarce, and expensive to recruit, hire, pay, and retain.
In May 2018, data protection solution provider Carbonite published a blog post that quotes research conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). The company surveyed 651 IT decision makers at midmarket and enterprise companies representing more than 20 industries.
Respondents were asked in which areas of IT their organizations had a problematic shortage of existing skills. The top areas cited were cybersecurity (51%), IT architecture and planning (33%), server virtualization and administration (26%), data protection, backup and recovery (26%), and application development (25%).
The next-most-cited shortage? Compliance management, monitoring, and reporting (25%). More than one-fifth of respondents also cited network (23%), storage (22%), and database (22%) management.
Even the largest enterprises have trouble fully staffing their IT departments. The situation is even worse for smaller companies with fewer resources. And traditional per-hour or per-project consultants can quickly become unbearably expensive for almost any company.
Overcoming the Skills Gaps: Tools Plus Services
Fortunately, the right technologies can help reduce the effects that IT skills gaps have on your business. Tools that support automation of mundane, repetitive tasks can free up precious human bandwidth, and let your IT team member spend more time on higher-value tasks and projects.
Tools that enable comprehensive discovery and flexible, powerful reporting can ease, speed, improve, and maintain compliance and enable tailored, actionable reporting. Effective monitoring and management tools can provide consistent, granular, policy-driven management and administration of your IT assets and resources.
Paradoxically, while tools can help you overcome the skills gap, the skills gap can slow or stall implementation of those helpful tools. Fortunately, managed services can accelerate time to success with management tools, without the expense or difficulty of hiring staff or traditional consultants.
When offered by experts who are able and willing to understand and support the unique requirements of your business, tools, and services can help your IT and your business to “succeed fast” with every step toward maximum business value and digital transformation.
Virima: Your Guide to Faster IT Success
Virima’s solutions for IT Discovery, IT Asset Management (ITAM), and IT Service Management (ITSM) provide the functionality and ease of use you require to deliver maximum management of your IT environment, economically and with minimal disruption or risk.
They can capture and inventory data about your IT environment’s components automatically. They are able to map dependencies, visualize relationships, and provide accurate, complete, timely information about your environment. These benefits help make your environment more available, compliant, manageable, responsive, secure, stable, and valuable to your business.
Virima also offers a suite of Managed SaaS Services (MSS). Dedicated MSS team members create the configurations, reports, probes, and other items you need to hit the ground running with your Virima tool deployments.
And these services are available during implementation or anytime you have new goals for using Virima. Users simply submit requests from within Virima for the MSS team to complete. Most common requests will be completed within the same day.
With MSS, Virima also monitors your Virima system and suggests ways to improve results and further drive adoption. Your team takes full advantage of Virima, without having to perform any of the necessary configuration changes. This makes Virima even easier to use and significantly lowers your total cost of ownership (TCO).
Virima features can automatically discover and map your critical IT resources and the interconnections that link them to one another, your applications and services, and your users.
Virima is here to help. To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!
