IT services are absolutely indispensable for enterprises today. The functionality of these services largely depends on the quality of the same, which constitutes how prompt, secure, agile, mobile and scalable it is. When services measure up to these constituency characteristics, there’s a good chance your enterprise is dealing with an ever multiplying customer base. This makes automation of your operations imperative. As much as automation cuts cost, enhances agility and improves standardization, it naturally lacks the human intuition to detect loopholes in the operations. It is through this technical escape clause, unplanned interruption to the IT service occurs, which is aimed at hampering the quality of the same. This disruption in the operation is known as an ‘Incident’, and the supervision to prevent, repair or restore the system to get it back on its feet is called ‘Incident Management’.
An incident, in other words, is an event which normally is not part of the standard operation, usually aimed at slowing down delivery pace, deteriorating content quality or manipulating data. Knowing the complexity of the enterprise operations and scalability of their customer base, the nature of incidents would forever be changing. However, from a macro perspective, incidents occur principally through three access points.
- 1. Software
- 2. Hardware
- 3. Service Requests
Problem management departments and known-error databases have been developing anti-incident technologies that potentially detect, prevent, repair or reduce the effect of incidents on the overall operations of enterprises.
An ideal Incident Management model focuses on service restoration as quick as possible, at the cheapest available option. Back to business as usual is more important when an incident occurs than taking unreasonably long to collect data for root cause investigation. Given the complexity of enterprise operations today, it is vital for enterprises to choose and adapt an Incident Management model that aligns best with the nature of the business. That being said, almost all enterprises today have come to consider the conventional Incident Management models obsolete and are enabling virtual models that need little or no manual supervision.
By enabling a virtual Incident Management model, enterprises now can automate their control of external incidents and minimize the negative impact of their disruptions. By deploying a combination of people, process and technology to restore service as quick as possible and minimalize the effect of incidents on other departments, Incident-Management-as-a-Service (IMaaS) can be another feather to the cloud computing crown.
Raghuram is a former Happiest Mind and this content was created and published during his tenure.
