Not many companies can afford to keep staff glued to green screens 24/7, so what are some of the pressing concerns IT Managers worry will be missed during the night shift or over the weekend?
- What if there is a power outage?
- What if a tape breaks?
- What if the paper runs out and no one notices or is there to change it?
- What if there is a paper jam that holds up thousands of reports over the weekend?
- What if there is a software glitch that interrupts the production of electronic invoicing?
- What if a heavily loaded job queue gets derailed by malfunction?
- What if back-up fails?
- What if our Credit Card Processing Program Fails?
- What if our online Banking software stops running?
- What if disc space is reaching capacity?
- What if important subsystems malfunction when no one is actively monitoring?
- What if a software change causes a program to fail during the middle of the night?
- What if a program encounters an issue that causes it to loop endlessly delaying subsequent jobs from running?
All of these questions are based on real situations facing our clients. That’s why IT folks have to have nerves of steel and see around the corners.
Now let’s talk about some of the pain points caused if these “what if” questions actually happen, and the control and options that happen when you have emergency notification and message software.
Power outages and natural disasters: Back-up generators and redundant data centers can provide excellent coverage but not all companies have these safety features. And even if they do, the quicker they get notified the quicker they can jump on the problem.
Back-up Assurance: Losing even one day of data can cause huge customer and regulatory headaches for some of our clients that want assurance that end-of-day and back-up are completing as expected.
Credit Card Processing and Invoicing and online Banking: The hits to the bottom line are obvious when you can’t complete sales for customers and when you can’t invoice for monies due. We know of a bank that could not open business Monday because of a glitch that happened on Sunday. Getting an alert over the weekend would have allowed precious repair time in advance of the next day of business.
Disc Capacity Reached: IBM i, iSeries, and AS/400 servers simply shut down when capacity is reached. A warning that the disc is at near capacity allows for time to install a new hard drive.
Installing monitoring and notification software helps to minimize and even anticipate these issues. Disruptions of the valuable output from your IBM servers hurt efficiency, customer satisfaction, accounts payable, and sales and marketing information that drive growth, and other vital areas of your company.
Interested in getting some peace of mind about your IBM output? Our MessageFlex software sends you an immediate alert 24/7 via email or text message when a problem is detected. Click here for more information.
Interested in a free demo? Start the process here.
Insider Note: We are getting ready to announce a major upgrade to MessageFlex. There may be a price increase coming but we will offer a discount during the first 30 days of this major release. We want to give time to those companies that are currently looking at the software to explore the enhancements before making a purchasing decision. More details coming soon.
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