The rise of digital technologies and the pursuant move to digital transformation has caused the IT infrastructure to expand and become more critical. As more technologies get added to the infrastructure to enable ease of business, drive availability and performance and fuel the anytime-anywhere work environment, the burden on the infrastructure keeps increasing paralleled by its importance.

 

The growing complexity of IT infrastructure.

Enterprises are also navigating an extremely complex and dynamic market. To drive business competitiveness, enterprises need to increase their agility and responsiveness to market demands.

As a result, we have seen the rise of development methodologies such as Agile and DevOps that make rolling out new updates, features, and functionalities easier and help enterprises respond to changing market and customer demands at speed. We have also seen the increased demand for faster provisioning, and de-provisioning of IT Infrastructure as development and deployment cycles become shorter and more frequent.

The rise of the cloud and virtual systems adds to the complexity of IT infrastructure. As the security perimeter becomes obsolete with the rise of anytime-anywhere work and the rise of hybrid and remote work, IT infrastructure management is becoming more complicated. As cyberattacks, malware, botnet trojans, etc. become more commonplace, ensuring virtual infrastructure safety becomes crucial.

Further, new implementations and the growing number of elements in infrastructure systems are also increasing IT infrastructure vulnerabilities. As business processes and workflows become more complex, it further adds to the complexity of IT infrastructure management as the ecosystem must add security tools into it as well.

Along with all this, the increase in automation to support Agile and DevOps, increasing adoption of modern Micro Services Architecture based Applications, cloud-native applications, serverless and Infrastructure As Code (IAC) add pressure on IT infrastructure management.

The narrative becomes more complex as we see the Dev/Test/Pre-Production and Production Virtual Machines out of on-premise data centers to hosted, co-located, private or public clouds to move from a CapEx to an OpEx model.

Today, essential enterprise systems have also become dependent on the IT infrastructure. These systems, such as CRM, ERP systems, etc. are crucial to enterprise functions and demand the right infrastructure provisioning and high level of support to drive productivity. The IT infrastructure must deliver performance, availability, and scalability.

These technological shifts have helped organizations capitalize on market opportunities, increase the pace of innovation and competitiveness and improve responsiveness to market and customer demands. However, enterprises need to take better control of their IT infrastructure for better provisioning and availability while ensuring security and reducing the burden on IT teams.

 

The benefits of optimized IT infrastructure

In this software-defined and technologically driven world, any software or technology is only as great as the infrastructure that supports it. An optimized IT infrastructure maximizes business revenue as it helps enterprises eliminate silos and enables technology to work more efficiently.

Optimized IT infrastructures provide greater scalability and allow enterprises to scale vertically and horizontally with minimal business impact. It also ensures that employees can collaborate effectively, productively, and securely in a distributed, global, and always-on work environment. IT infrastructure also impacts customer experiences and hence, becomes an important pillar supporting today’s enterprises.

The absence of a highly available, well-performing, and secure infrastructure is almost unthinkable today. Choppy user experiences, downtime, low productivity, siloed information, and poor decisions can impact business outcomes. It can also impact the ability of an organization to respond to market and customer demands and impede their ability to develop and deploy impactful solutions to drive compelling experiences. Avoiding infrastructure downtime also becomes critical to ensure business continuity in a highly competitive business environment.

Apart from that, it has also become essential to ensure employees can use these powerful tools and technologies as intended. If they are unable to make the most of the tools, essential processes will grind to a halt and performance will stall. Even the best technology cannot deliver value if employees can’t use it to overcome business challenges and become more efficient and effective. The case can easily be made that supporting employees as they navigate this dynamic high-tech landscape and work with complex yet essential enterprise systems is the most likely point of failure. In many ways, an inability to provide support to employees is the weakest link in this robust enterprise technology chain.

 

How an IT helpdesk influences organizational performance

As the world of work becomes global, distributed, and hybrid, the role of a robust helpdesk becomes crucial to ensure that an available, well-performing, and secure infrastructure supports the workforce of today.

In most organizations, IT helpdesks, however, end up being mediators between end users and IT experts. These personnel might not have any visibility into the different infrastructure tiers or the operational state of IT services. This helpdesk invariably operates like a complaint cell and ends up scheduling calls for IT experts.

A comprehensive, robust, and secure IT helpdesk system becomes crucial to optimize productivity and drive robust infrastructure management. This ensures better availability of resources and increases the responsiveness of IT teams towards incidents, requests, and ongoing upgrades.

As the IT infrastructure ecosystem includes enterprise systems, workflows, and processes that influence business performance, a robust IT helpdesk can play a pivotal role in reducing downtime while also gaining deep and clear insights into infrastructure performance issues. An IT helpdesk, as such, almost emerges like the enabler of productivity promise that technological innovations, applications, and systems offer as they troubleshoot challenges that impact productivity and innovation.

A well-designed and optimized helpdesk can do a lot of heavy lifting for enterprises, such as:

  • Deliver L1/2 end-user support and production monitoring, and L3/4 for bug fixes, maintenance, and enhancements.
  • Manage all technology upgrades for major and minor releases, application, cloud, and platform migration to ensure uninterrupted services and application availability
  • Optimize the technology environment proactively to reduce downtime, improve availability and elevate the productivity of resources.
  • Continuously monitor application portfolios and implement timely security updates to enhance availability and uptime.
  • Research, evaluate, and test the best-fit enterprise tools and technologies per business needs
  • Proactively detect and fix application and data quality issues to ensure compliance and mitigate risk
  • Deliver clear insights and reduce costs while ensuring improved management, governance, and automation of IT infrastructure

An IT helpdesk ultimately allows enterprises to ensure optimal utilization of their IT assets. Automated IT operations management frees up internal resources for higher-value tasks while reducing costs associated with manpower.

Given today’s fast-paced business environment, a comprehensive IT helpdesk eliminates deficiencies in IT systems that cause system crashes and reduced performance. An IT Managed Solution Provider (MSP) program contributes immensely to this. It helps enterprises eliminate large-scale capital expenditures, configure systems to industry standards, monitor performance, and ultimately improve costs and user satisfaction.

When selecting such a partner, it is however essential to identify a provider that leverages an ITIL-based service delivery model and has strategic partnerships with leading vendors to ensure the right technology and architecture choices. State-of-the-art global infrastructure and experienced professionals also become crucial to the mix to ensure successful managed service delivery by aligning IT operations to business performance. Consistent service delivery experience across multiple geographies is a bonus.

Connect with our team of experts to see how you can supercharge your IT helpdesk and make it the enabler of productivity in your enterprise.