Fact: Today's businesses must be available 24/7 with fewer people having to manage more complex systems and processes.

Editor's note: This article introduces the white paper "5 Winning Strategies to Combat Information Overload" available free at the MC White Paper Center.

IT departments receive a constant bombardment of information from a diverse variety of operating systems, business applications, and critical processes and support a complex array of servers and devices running across their entire network.

With tight resources and the need to keep costs in check, more and more is expected of IT operational staff to handle this information efficiently. They need to ensure a swift response with appropriate actions, that essential data is received at the right time, prove service levels are maintained, that contingency and high availability strategies are fully operational, and that vital business activities run smoothly and without disruption.

To monitor every application and system requires the eyes of a hawk and the arms of an octopus!

One solution is to have a holistic view of your enterprise from a single screen that must be portable, such as a smartphone or tablet. Who wants to pull out a laptop in the middle of a ball game to see why business applications are performing slowly or why your CEO cannot access their email?

But the total solution is more involved than that. What kind of safety net processes can you put in place so you can combat "Information Overload," yet not miss a single thing, drop the ball, or cause a negative impact on the business, and more importantly, how do you go about it?

In this white paper, I will investigate how to handle the daily deluge of information as well as my five recommended strategies and solutions you can deploy to become an IT superhero in your organization. 

The Problem with History Is That It Is Always in the Past

How many times has somebody, maybe even you, started a sentence with "I remember when..." or "When I worked at..."? You know that what you are about to hear is a story based upon experience of how the person involved was a superhero in a particular IT computing related firefighting story and how they have enjoyed the glory since it happened a few years ago, or many years ago, but most realistically, a couple of decades ago.

What the story reveals is that being a superhero in the working environment is a great feeling; it shows commitment, enjoyment, passion, and fulfillment.

Do you recognize those phrases as words you would use to describe yourself in your current role? Are you a superhero, or do you now find it is so difficult to understand all the aspects of what you are meant to be supporting that it is impossible to be that hero anymore?

Let's say you are an IBM i operations specialist and an expert in your field. Well, today you must also be a Windows specialist, perhaps due to company acquisitions and mergers, or downsizing and employee layoffs, and you may now need to understand AIX or Linux, and you must manage and monitor networking equipment, firewalls, routers, switches, cabling. The list is endless.

Probably the most important point I need to emphasize is that to achieve superhero status you need to ensure the business is running correctly as well. Specifically, that the essential applications your business uses to function must be readily available and perform quickly enough for your users. You need to also ensure that, if anything does go wrong, you can recover from it promptly and efficiently.

In my opinion, the real cause of the problem is "Information Overload."

To find out more, download the free white paper "5 Winning Strategies to Combat Information Overload" from the MC White Paper Center.

About Halcyon Software

Halcyon Software is a global leader in multi-platform systems management solutions that reduce the complexity and cost of monitoring critical business systems, core applications and processes. They help companies prevent business disruption, increase the efficiency of their IT services and save costs.  In most cases, Halcyon’s solutions increase IT efficiency by 30 – 40 percent, delivering significant savings and a rapid return on investment – often in less than six months.

Halcyon achieves this in three ways:

Monitoring: Halcyon’s monitoring software keeps a vigilant watch on the most critical IT systems and core applications on which business depends. IT administrators receive early warnings of any potential problems or ‘bottlenecks’ before they affect the organization.

Automating: Halcyon enables IT teams to set up ‘self–corrective actions’ to issues or problems to ensure that they never impact the business again.  IT teams can also automate regular tasks, checks or jobs which would normally be undertaken manually. This frees up valuable resources, saves costs and helps to eliminate human error. 

Reporting: Halcyon’s cloud-based reporting solution proves to management that the IT team is achieving the service levels demanded by the business or flags any issues so they can be quickly resolved. 

Halcyon’s products support IBM Power Systems servers running IBM i, AIX, Linux and Windows. With regional offices in the United States, Australia and UK, Halcyon also has a network of partners and distributors supporting territories world-wide. For further information, please visit www.halcyonsoftware.com