In Australia’s geographically dispersed landscape, many organisations rely on remote offices, sub-branches and mobile workforces to maintain business operations. In many cases, these remote workforces are thousands of kilometres from headquarters and capital cities and must rely on their own resources in order to maintain functionality.
The recent COVID-19 crisis forced many organisations and their workforces into temporary remote work scenarios. In fact, a recent study we conducted found that a full 91% of global IT leaders were working remotely during the COVID-19 crisis, either by choice or as required by their organisations.
While the flexibility to work remotely is great, especially in the midst of a crisis, remote work creates challenges in any situation. From an IT perspective, it requires investing in and maintaining a reliable network; providing access to cloud-based files and applications; and maintaining hardware and storage – generally without dedicated technical resources on site.
While basic tasks such as hardware deployments and application updates can be performed by tech-savvy employees with a little help from HQ, maintaining a robust, reliable IT infrastructure and monitoring that infrastructure is a requirement for keeping the business up and running. This task is far beyond the skills of the average office manager.
Best practices for infrastructure monitoring involve gaining insight into each and every business-critical component across the entire IT environment, regardless of location. Oftentimes, these components (and the requirements of each particular location) may well differ from those of headquarters or other locations.
Therefore, the first step to monitoring and maintaining remote locations is understanding which networks, cloud applications, servers and more are running in each location and why. This understanding is key in gaining visibility into IT infrastructure across all locations. Initial questions to ask about the IT infrastructure of remote locations include:
How business-critical is the IT infrastructure being monitored in each remote location?
What would happen if the IT infrastructure went offline at a particular location?
Would downtime at one location impact other locations as well?
This in turn leads to the question: what level of monitoring does each location require, and what tools are needed? Does the location require monitoring constantly, or just periodically throughout the day? Are there already monitoring tools in place, and do they match those at other locations? Could monitoring tools help with troubleshooting in the case of recurring issues?
It all comes back to the question of understanding the IT infrastructure and working out the specific needs of each location. There may, for example, be a history of network issues in a particular office that regularly set off alerts back at headquarters. Without the proper visibility into a remote location’s IT infrastructure, technicians may have had to travel hundreds of kilometres to iron out flaws in the network.
Many of these alerts could potentially be avoided by properly monitoring and detecting recurring issues – or in some cases, finding the source of the issues, which may be causing problems downstream. On-site IT involvement can often be eliminated by getting to the source of the problem early. If monitoring can prevent IT teams from traveling three or four hours in a car each way, the return on investment can be profound.
Because of the challenges of maintaining IT infrastructure in remote locations, many organizations are shifting their IT infrastructure and monitoring solutions to the cloud. Our recent survey of 500 global IT decision-makers found that the vast majority of global IT leaders rank investing in productivity tools and expanding the use of cloud as the top tactics they have adopted to maintain business continuity and serve customers during remote workforce challenges caused by the COVID-19 crisis.
With cloud-based IT infrastructure, organizations are able to cash in on the many benefits the cloud provides, including flexibility, scalability, reduced IT costs and business continuity. Global IT leaders in Australia and New Zealand are especially bullish on the cloud, with 76% saying they believe more than 95% of all public, private, and hybrid workloads will run in the cloud within the next five years.
Knowing this, it should follow that monitoring will shift to the cloud as well. Cloud-based monitoring offers the same advantages of other cloud-based technologies, and agentless options can be especially impactful for distributed organizations as they’re quickly and easily deployed via the cloud without weighing down IT infrastructure.
With a proper monitoring solution in place, IT teams can keep an eye on remote locations without having to burden on-site teams or hit the road to troubleshoot issues. With comprehensive IT infrastructure monitoring, IT teams can predict outages before they impact the business, isolate issues and bottlenecks, reduce alert noise and ultimately free up their time to focus on more important, strategic work.
A thorough monitoring plan for remote locations is essential to ensure the smooth running of critical business infrastructure, and ultimately provide the best experience for employees and customers. An effective IT infrastructure monitoring solution not only improves business efficiency, but also saves operating expenses associated with running remote offices and locations.
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WhaTech Staff Writers
