Is your business at risk when your IT staff take annual leave or sick leave?
Many businesses rely on only 1 staff member to look after their IT systems and ensure critical services such as accounting software, payroll applications and email are all functioning correctly. When your IT staff are on leave and not contactable staff have to wait for issues to be resolved which can lead to lost work time, lower productivity and even lost business or legal complications.
Most businesses will benefit from a good business continuity plan, which highlights critical business systems and provides for either redundancy or clear escalation and contingency measures in the event of a system failure. A good example of this would be for email services which are critical for business communication. There are many backup solutions that can be applied to your email services that will allow staff to continue working in the event of primary email services failing. This can also be supplemented with have several methods of access to email including outlook, web mail and via a phone application.
Another approach you might take internally to mitigate this risk could be assigning other non IT staff to handle critical support in the event of system failure. These staff can be trained to trouble shoot some basic problems and where possible learn how to restart services on business critical applications and services. This approach does need to be implemented cautiously however as untrained staff could unwittingly compound a problem by trying to resolve problems incorrectly.
A more stable and long term solution however would be to consider a staff backfill solution from FunctionEight Ltd. We have a number of contract solutions that allow you to call on FunctionEight’s expertise in the event of IT staff leave or absence. This support can be either pre-planned for each holiday or used on an as needed basis. This additional resource could also be a helpful back up for IT staff in the event that they have large projects planned and additional support is need to complete the project.
Email f8.info@functioneight.com or call +852 2868 2855 or +65 6345 5880 now to see how FunctionEight can support your IT systems.
