At the beginning of 2013 with all the news regarding the fiscal cliff, and the woes that awaited our country if we were to “fall off” of it, I found myself thinking about a similar scenario I see play out time and time again in the IT industry: the IT systems cliff, also known as the catastrophic system failure.

Systems today have become so complex that they are often difficult to maintain, and even harder to troubleshoot. There is a large number of hardware, software, and networking components that have to work together in order to ensure a particular application is presented properly to the user. Oftentimes a system failure is not simply the result of one single failure in this process; but rather multiple failures spanning several components and often built up over time. This can make troubleshooting and resolving these system failures very difficult and time consuming.

As technology has changed over the years, the IT industry has had to adapt to new methods of thinking in order to better approach system failures, and ensure the maximum amount of uptime in a given system. One of these new methods is often referred to as IT Management as a Service. This strategy allows one to maintain the heartbeat of their systems, and gather useful information of how a given system is behaving before a major failure occurs. This allows a great deal of catastrophic system failures to be caught and resolved long before the phone starts ringing off the hook with users reporting that they can’t log in.

While there are several methods available to IT administrators today that allow them to monitor and manage their systems, the challenge that many organizations are faced with is finding the time and resources available to perform this task. One of the benefits to an ITMaaS strategy is that you can rely on the skills and expertise of seasoned IT engineers to manage your network, which then frees you up to do other tasks.  Partnering with an ITMaaS provider makes avoiding a full system failure much easier, and provides peace of mind knowing that you have a large array of IT knowledge at your disposal. In essence, you are employing a full IT staff complete with engineers well versed in today’s leading technologies. This gives you the assurance that these small component failures will be caught early on and addressed, before they have the opportunity to snowball into larger issues, and ultimately system down catastrophes.

So, as we have all taken a sigh of relief about avoiding the nation’s “fiscal cliff”, consider how you can best prepare your organization to also avoid the “IT systems cliff”.