Let’s be honest – IT ticketing is a pain. Nobody likes it on either side of the equation. Here’s the good news, though: self-healing endpoints can accelerate the end of IT ticketing as you know it in your organisation. It’s the death of the IT ticket, and it’s a loss that few people will mourn.
In this blog, we’ll give an overview of the current state of IT ticketing before highlighting self-healing endpoints, how they work, how they are changing IT ticketing, and the benefits to your organisation.
IT Ticketing – A Frustration and a Cost
IT ticketing is a business essential, but it frustrates users, delays work, and impacts productivity. It’s also a strain on technical resources, where skilled staff must spend large amounts of their time, often solving the same problems over and over again.
But the biggest problem with IT ticketing is cost. Put it all together, from lost user productivity to repetitive incidents and everything in between, and you are talking about costs well into the millions.
There are lots of technologies, concepts, and solutions that are meting out the death blows to the IT ticket, but the most ferocious is the self-healing endpoint.
What Are Self-Healing Endpoints?
Self-healing endpoints have enabling technologies that mean they can autonomously detect, diagnose, and repair issues without human intervention. This includes intervention from users of the device as well as intervention from IT support staff.
How It Works
We can use our product, Access Symphony, to demonstrate how you can enable self-healing endpoints in your organisation and how they work. Access Symphony is a product that optimises end-user experience (EUX). One of the modules in Access Symphony is Symphony Fix Engine.
Here’s how the process works:
- An IT issue is identified through usual means. This could be through technical resources proactively identifying potential issues or a new issue being flagged by a user.
- The issue is assigned to a technical resource who develops a fix and adds that fix to the Symphony Fix Engine database.
- The fix is then automatically applied to endpoints running Symphony Fix Engine.
You remain in control throughout, including whether the fix is automatically applied (self-healing) or made available to users on a self-service basis (click to fix).
The Benefits of Self-Healing Endpoints
- Instant resolution – as soon as a fix is developed, it can be instantly and automatically applied by the self-healing endpoints in your network.
- Zero downtime – as the problem doesn’t actually surface for users, there is no downtime.
- Facilitates predictive and preventative fixes (proactive IT support) – fixes can be developed and applied on a proactive basis before users experience problems.
- Fully scalable – you can enable self-healing capabilities on as many endpoints as required, ensuring full scalability for large organisations.
- Improved IT resource efficiency – technical resources will spend less time on IT ticketing, especially the repetitive aspects of IT ticketing. They can instead spend their time on value-adding technical tasks.
- Reduced costs – cost savings come from a more efficient use of IT resources and improved user productivity.
- Improved user satisfaction – users often experience a double whammy of frustration with IT ticketing. The first level of frustration comes from encountering the problem. The second level occurs when they have to wait for a response, and the inconveniences that such delays cause. Both levels of frustration are eliminated by self-healing endpoints.
- Improved security and compliance – security and compliance are improved with proactive control over the application of fixes, especially security patches.
Making IT Support Invisible
The death of the IT ticket brought about by self-healing endpoints (and other EUX technologies) will bring another change to your organisation – IT support will become invisible to everyday users.
Work will continue to fix problems and keep your endpoints up to date, but it will be in the background with no impact on the day-to-day experience of the vast majority of users.
As well as becoming invisible, your IT function will be able to move from firefighting to innovation. Rather than working at pace just to stand still, your IT resources will be able to modernise, improve, and help ensure your business has the IT infrastructure it needs for the future.
As a follow-up to this blog, we will be publishing a case study that shows how one of our enterprise clients dramatically cut the volume of IT support tickets raised by users. Follow us on LinkedIn to stay up to date.
To find out more about self-healing endpoints and how you can use Access Symphony to bring about the death of the IT ticket in your organisation, get in touch with us today to schedule a demo.
