The best incident management solutions strengthen a business’ security and reporting processes—but they also help the company better leverage its staff, infrastructure, and resources as well. At the same time, the solution relies on the company’s personnel and infrastructure to operate with maximum effectiveness, efficiency, and security.
Of course, businesses may not have the latest or most secure infrastructure, and they may not have the optimal amount of staff bandwidth available to deploy and host the system they want. Fortunately, this doesn’t mean they have to choose between a more basic incident reporting solution and a costly overhaul of their company’s infrastructure.
Today, businesses have another option—online incident management. Usually accessed through a web client rather than a desktop program, they can make adopting a new incident management solution easier and less costly, while providing the same level of functionality of traditional, on-premise incident management products.
How are online incident management solutions different from on-premise solutions?
Sometimes called SaaS or cloud-based solutions, these incident management products work on a hosted model—which differ from traditional incident management solutions in a couple of key ways.
- Hosted solutions are licensed (usually monthly or yearly) rather than bought outright.
- The software is hosted by the solutions provider, rather than on your infrastructure.
Like many providers, PPM offers Perspective Hosted solutions. While functionality varies by provider, hosted solutions, in essence, give you the ability to outsource your incident management solution’s hardware, software, and support needs to the solution provider.
What are the advantages of a hosted solution?
The best hosted solutions are backed by dedicated resources, staff, and infrastructure. What’s great about this is that it lets you leverage those assets at a fraction of the cost of building up the technical capacity within your company.
The best hosted solutions offer:
- A guarantee of reliability and a disaster recovery plan to minimize the chance of service downtime.
- Reduced total cost of ownership, because you’re outsourcing IT infrastructure and support expenses to the solutions provider.
- Efficient deployment of the solution, with less need to burden your IT department for set up.
- Lower maintenance and IT requirements for your organization.
- Automatic updates and upgrades—always be on the best and greatest version.
What types of businesses benefit most from online incident management solution?
Here are a few guidelines to help you figure out whether a hosted model works for you:
- Consider your personnel resources. Will you be able to deploy and host the solution without burdening other departments (IT, management, etc.)? If not, a cloud-based solution can help you avoid spreading your team too thin.
- Determine whether your data will be safer on-site or off-site. This means more than network security and physical security for your data. If deciding to host your data on site, be absolutely sure that your data will be safe from unforeseen challenges like power loss, hardware failure, or catastrophic events. If handled by your team, you should be confident that all members abide by ITIL or similar best practices for IT security.
- Think about your current and infrastructure capabilities. Can your hardware and systems support the level of functionality and reliability you need? If not, ask yourself if you’re better off investing time and capital to upgrade your hardware or letting a solutions vendor handle it instead.
- Assess your budget needs. If you have a limited capital budget, the subscription hosted solution can be a good way to incorporate incident management expenditures into your operating expenses.
After you begin sorting out these bigger questions, you’ll be in a much better place to discuss hosting options and to figure out what will work best for your organization. You might even want to move your on-premise incident management system to an online, hosted model. Either way, we’d love to discuss this further with you.
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