How to Achieve Full IT Visibility Across the Enterprise after an IT Outage

Do you know which software is running across your IT estate?

As last week’s global IT outages demonstrated, even the most resilient enterprise IT systems can experience major outages. Accordingly, IT leaders are tasked with not only preventing such incidents (the “What keeps you up at night?” scenarios) but also ensuring fast recovery when outages do occur.  

During the recovery phase, endpoint monitoring tools with software audit capabilities are essential for gaining the enterprise-wide visibility and insights needed to understand the scope of the outage’s impact. Which software versions are running and on which computers? Which systems were affected? From there, IT teams can start to get back to normalcy. 

Software audit tools are designed to monitor, evaluate, and report on the software environment within an organization. They can track changes, analyze configurations, and ensure compliance with internal policies and external regulations. During the recovery phase of an IT outage, IT teams especially need to get a quick handle on which software versions are running on which systems. The war-room goal is to pinpoint affected systems and, in many cases, which software deployments have been patched post-outage. 

Lakeside’s SysTrack endpoint monitoring platform provides this specific analysis. SysTrack can quickly give IT teams insight into all the versions of software running throughout the estate to help identify where to focus recovery efforts and mitigate further risk. SysTrack also maximizes recovery and security by identifying patching issues and ensuring that endpoints are fully compliant with organizational policies post-recovery. Day to day, SysTrack also can monitor poorly performing applications and shine a light on shadow IT. 

Much of the work related to recovery starts and ends with visibility. Of course, full visibility into the IT environment isn’t always easy to achieve. There are a number of visibility challenges that organizations have to contend with. Finding solutions to these challenges, however, can put you on the path toward swift recovery.

Common Barriers to Full Visibility

There are a few common obstacles that can make complete organizational visibility difficult. It is important to tackle these challenges to optimize IT operations. Gaining this proactive visibility enables swift recovery and response should a widespread outage occur.

The first is the challenge of fragmented data. There are many IT monitoring solutions on the market, but most of them are narrow in scope. They may specifically monitor network performance, for example, or collect data on endpoint uptime. Although these are valuable metrics, they don’t tell the full story needed in day-to-day operations or, more important, for the recovery phase after a major IT outage.

When visibility is fragmented like this, issues that may require attention could easily slip through the cracks. It also means that IT can’t measure the impact of technology on users. When IT data is taken out of context, it’s harder to arrive at the critical insights that reveal how downtime or disruptions impact employees’ abilities to do their jobs.

These challenges are further complicated by the emerging challenges of hybrid work. Remote and hybrid employees are more likely to use “shadow IT” — unauthorized apps or devices — to do their work. This increases the chances that unexpected problems will emerge and makes troubleshooting these problems more difficult.

Overcoming these challenges is often an ongoing process, but it can be aided by taking steps to collect data about IT performance. Specifically, organizations need both a thorough approach to performance data collection and a strategy for gathering subjective user sentiment about digital experiences.

Gathering Robust Performance Data

The first step to complete IT visibility is to collect data on how everything in your IT environment is performing. It’s generally best to eliminate solutions that provide fragmented data and instead invest in one holistic solution. This ensures that you have a full view of everything that happens in your organization — and a widespread outage’s impact on your IT estate, such as that experienced after the compromised CrowdStrike software update last week.

An ideal IT visibility solution should have multiple levels of insight into the IT environment, including a high-level health score the provides granular data on specific devices, applications, and other endpoints, as well as illustrates the average quality of the user experience.

In addition, visibility into specific devices is necessary for troubleshooting urgent issues. Device-specific visibility also allows IT staff to perform advanced root cause analysis on unexpected issues, run automated fixes, if possible, and otherwise operate the help desk more efficiently.

Having this breadth of data — broad overviews, insight into specific categories of users or technology, and visibility into individual devices — means your IT team will always have the information necessary to take action to improve the user experience.

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Full Visibility for Optimized IT

There’s a lot that goes into gaining full organizational visibility. Any organization consists of such a diverse array of technologies and user interactions that full visibility can only be gained by gathering an extensive amount of performance data and supplementing it with occasional user surveys.

Not all data collection is up to the task, though. It’s important to look for holistic IT endpoint monitoring solutions that give you insight into every aspect of your environment at both a broad and granular level. As IT continues to evolve and ways of working continue to introduce new complications and risks, achieving full IT visibility has become an imperative.