When it comes to IT support your business is probably looking for two things, you're looking to save operational costs, especially in this current economic climate, and you're looking at protecting and maximising the IT investment you've made to support your business. Both of these objectives are easy to achieve so long as you understand the criticality of the IT systems and components in relation to the business. The higher the importance and criticality then the higher the service level. The lower the importance and criticality then the lower the service level. By taking this approach customers can actually realize saving of up to 30% as apposed to a single service level across the business. This is the smart approach to IT support.



The smart approach to IT support means there are packages available for every business, from the global corporation down to the small businesses. Off the shelf, prepackaged, pre priced IT support is going to be more suitable for some small businesses and it's available in different service levels. If you've got a mission critical server that you want covered, then you could get a committed or guaranteed service which is straight of the shelf, and for a lower level of service, say for a development or a test system, then a Monday to Friday, or a next business day responses would be appropriate. The key is really to understand your environment and assign the right level of service.

One of the most significant changes in IT support in recent years is the growing importance and dependence on remote support. Traditionally, when customers had a hardware problem they'd call in an engineer, and engineer would order a part and if they couldn't fix it, they'd maybe get the senior engineer involved and this meant long down times for customers. Remote support really turns that on it's head. It takes the burden away from the customer site so the support translates into higher availability for the customer.

Most IT systems these days are built with a level of resilience, resilience is designed into it to protect against critical business impact, but it's important to look at what the implications are of an outage on the business, it's also important to consider how systems and IT components interact with each other regardless of manufacture. It's then a case of taking all this information and creating a benchmark. Against your IT systems and components, what support have you got in place today? Is it fit for purpose? Can you identify any gaps that require addressing? The next step is to get a align the service with the business critical components making sure to remember software support because operating system support is a key component in any IT systems, not only the technical support but also all the non defect support so for business critical environments, is it appropriate to have a service which answers the 'how to' questions. There are tools available on the web that can get you started with self assessment.

Everyone is trying to save money at the moment, but your IT support is not a very practical place to be frugal. The most significant risk is the potential impact on the business, if you're using maintenance like an insurance policy, then the chances are you don't want to use it, and like an insurance policy, there are usually exclusions, so it's really important to check what you're getting for your money, if there are exclusions someone has to pick those exclusions up. So if you're looking at a cheap maintenance deal, make sure you balance the risks against the value of the IT systems and also the risk to your business.