The IT Nerd

By Tim Flower, DEX Evangelist at Nexthink

Software supply chain disruptions are the biggest danger to business resiliency today. One response: moving past the traditional ‘break/fix’ model of IT Services.

The last year has seen a spate of high-profile outages that have affected thousands of companies and millions of endpoints around the world. While the events have been different in many ways, there is one underlying commonality – in each case, the root of problem is one that doesn’t get much attention: The software supply chains – i.e. all the existing component parts that underpin new software products – that enterprises and suppliers around the world rely upon, and are largely outside the control of internal IT teams.

Software supply chains are the single biggest danger to business resiliency today, with the average enterprise using nearly 1000 different apps [1] and 96% of codebases [2] featuring open source code.

All of this means that there’s no such thing as an ‘isolated incident’ anymore. Even if companies take every reasonable precaution, there is no guarantee that a mistake three steps down the line won’t cause days of unexpected downtime and millions in lost revenue. Even an unknown compatibility issue can lead to significant headaches during a large-scale deployment. Not to mention the hurdles encountered when the supplier changes versions or discontinues support.   

When disaster strikes

The problem is, when – and it is when, not if – major third-party incidents occur, the vast majority of businesses lack the visibility and capabilities needed to swiftly identify and remediate such issues. This is because many IT service delivery teams are using legacy management platforms that don’t allow them to move beyond a traditional, reactionary model of handling tickets one by one when employees decide to call for help. The employees are essentially providing IT monitoring services. This creates multiple problems, including:

• In the middle of a costly and reputationally damaging crisis, IT teams end up wasting precious time trying to understand the scale of the problem before they can even start to look at how it can be fixed. Indeed, sometimes endpoints can remain out of action for days until an employee opens a ticket with the Help Desk.  
• A lack of visibility also means that it’s impossible for IT service teams to effectively prioritize their remediation efforts to, for example, get customer-facing services up and running first to minimize external disruption.  –
• Additionally, it hampers any attempts at communication to give colleagues and clients information about what has happened and when normal service is likely to resume. 

An evolving function

None of this is to say that IT service teams are redundant or unimportant – far from it. Even when things are going smoothly, strong service teams are worth their weight in gold, never mind when a crisis occurs. In fact, as software supply chains become ever more entangled, the need for skilled IT support experts is only going to grow.

The issue is that, all too often, businesses aren’t providing their IT support staff with the necessary capabilities to proactively identify, understand, and mitigate problems. For instance, in the event of a major third-party outage causing a cascade of endpoints experiencing the dreaded ‘Blue Screen of Death’ (BSOD), IT support teams need to be alerted to an unusual spike in system crashes in real-time, which ones are being affected, and insights about what the common root cause might be. 

Armed with this information, IT support can take immediate steps to address the problem – for example by halting any application updates on other endpoints – and reduce the number of those affected by BSOD. And as endpoints are remediated, a platform providing real time visibility can provide immediate status details on which systems still need attention and which ones are back up and running. 

Managing the shift effectively

The surge in third-party software issues is a key driver of the transition away from the traditional ‘break/fix’ model of IT Services and towards something more proactive, but it’s not the only motive. Factors such as a desire to improve regulatory compliance, greater demand for upskilling and training from support workers, and changing ways of working are all key reasons why the transition is gathering pace. There is also a growing awareness that the 40+ year practice of reactionary IT is no longer scalable, and actually poses a risk to business viability.  

Taken together, the increased relevance of these issues demonstrates that there is a huge opportunity for IT services to take a larger and more important role in achieving core business objectives, especially as modern IT environments become ever-more complex. IT needs to be a provider of business-enabling services, and no longer a team of expensive fire fighters.   

The next step is for senior leaders to champion this change by providing support staff with the necessary training and the ability to bring in new, modern capabilities that can transform IT Services from a short-term, reactionary function to one that is central to the operation and success of the entire enterprise.

Tim Flower is VP of DEX Strategy at Nexthink and the author of the Wiley book: DEX for Dummies, a Practical Guide for Organizing and Executing an Effective DEX Strategy in Any Organization. 

1 2024 Connectivity Benchmark Report: Insights from over 1000 IT Leaders

2 2024 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis Report