Three Reasons to Rethink Your IT Maintenance Support

When hardware goes down, nothing is more infuriating than leading multiple vendors through a round of the blame game!

Now, let’s have a moment of silence for all the valuable minutes lost chasing manufacturer contacts down.

The new year lets us shine a light on how we approach support IT asset maintenance. From simple break-fix support to concise managed service capabilities, having the right technical team in place can not only reduce overall costs, but facilitate a positive return on investment and performance results on your networking, software, storage and systems.

Other IT professionals are thinking big picture when it comes to technical support. Have you considered how these stats might affect your organization?

1. Bigger Business Stakes. As tech’s reach grows, so does the scale of its impact.
   • The average annual cost of downtime to organizations can be up to 16 million USD[1].
   • Gartner forecasts that connected things worldwide will reach 20.8B by 2020, creating a vast network of vulnerabilities[2].

More people and devices are connected than ever before, meaning IT is more involved throughout your business. This increased interconnectedness means that even a small incident can lead to significant downtime and costs. Conversely, preventing these incidents can give your organization a competitive edge.

2. More Diverse Change to Manage. Get a handle on it now.
   • Over the next three years, 86 percent of IT and business executives expect the pace of technology change to increase rapidly or at an unprecedented rate[3].
   • By 2017, more than 50 percent of organizations’ IT spending will be for third-platform technologies, solutions and services[4].

Whether you’re updating aging infrastructure, adopting mobile and cognitive solutions, or expanding your business into new marketplace segments because of mergers or acquisitions, change isn’t easy—especially with limited capital budgets. You need quality support to help navigate change without disruption in a heterogeneous IT environment.

3. Broader Support Options. Remember to KISS, things don’t have to get more complex.
   • Nine out of ten IT professionals have current or planned technical support contracts for three or more devices[5], resulting in support across their infrastructure.
   • Over half of IT professionals are using six or more vendors to support multiple devices[6], adding new complexity to their support.

Wrangling multiple warranty and maintenance service providers is hard work and can increase risk. These challenges become even more difficult to manage while trying to address new technology needs, manage costs and bridge the talent gap in your organization. Add it all together, and, suddenly, your time and support seem alarmingly slim.

Portfolio management and maintenance can be a bear for IT leaders. What are your biggest technical support hurdles? Share with us in the comments.

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[1] 1 Veeam, 2016 Veeam Availability Report: How to Close a Widening Availability Gap, February 2016.

[2] Gartner, “Gartner Says 6.4 Billion Connected ‘Things’ Will Be in Use in 2016, Up 30 Percent from 2015,” press release, November, 2015.

[3] Accenture, Accenture Technology Vision 2016—People First: The Primacy of People in a Digital Age, August 2016.

[4] IDC, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide IT Industry 2016 Predictions—Leading Digital Transformation to Scale, Document No. 259850, November 2015.

[5] IBM, Technical Support Services Thought Leadership Study, August 2016.

[6] Ibid