With the ubiquity of information technology has arisen the need to have it up and running at all times. About 20 years ago, IT was still a novelty and nice-to-have but, now, businesses cannot function without it.
Imagine, on any given day, you are at work. You may be replying to an email or working on a remote file in the cloud. Out of the blue, your email server seems to stop responding. You call your IT colleague and she does not see any issue with the email server. You reboot your computer, your colleague runs several diagnostics on the email server, restarts it. Still it does not seem to work. The network is working fine. You are all perplexed.
After half a day of frustration, you all decide to call-in external technical experts who, after about 2 hour of conducting some tests, tell you that it is your security server that had blocked access to your email server as it had detected some malicious cyber activity.
They further advise you to get a network monitoring system (NMS) as then you can remove the guesswork and know when any of your IT systems perform suboptimally or experience unplanned downtime.
Since the NMS sends notifications by email, they also recommend you to get a notification management platform like sendQuick that sends notifications through email, SMS, social messenger apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, LINE, Viber and Telegram and team collaboration tools including Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams and Slack.
sendQuick Integration Within Corporate IT Network
At this stage, especially given your experience with the email server being seemingly non-responsive, you form or join a workgroup in figuring out which notification management system to get that you can integrate with your corporate IT infrastructure.
While there are different ways of researching and evaluating a technology, a good starting point is a thoughtfully prepared checklist. To point you in the right direction, we have developed one for you.
IT Notification Management
Solution Selection Checklist
| Criteria | Yes | No |
| Do we need a notification management system that comes with unlimited user licenses? | ||
| Does the system need to be easy to maintain? | ||
| Must the system be able to integrate with an unlimited number of back-end applications and systems? | ||
| Must the system be able to send out-of-band SMS alerts in real-time to our IT support personnel? | ||
| Must the system be able to reach the IT support personnel in more ways in addition to SMS and email? | ||
| Does the system need to have built-in roster management capability? | ||
| Must the system have built-in automated reminder and escalation feature? | ||
| Does the system need to support high availability (HA) option to reduce system downtime? | ||
| Does the system need to be compatible with email, syslog messages and SNMP Traps? | ||
| Does the system need to log all incoming and outgoing messages? | ||
| Does the system need to provide policy filters to send only the important messages to avoid alert fatigue? | ||
| Must the system be compatible with all network, security, data centre, monitoring and management tools? |
If you clicked “Yes” to all these requirements then you need a robust notification management platform like sendQuick.
However, you should delve deeper and determine if there are any other specific requirements you have or business needs that you need to address.
Click the Request for Information button, below, and get in touch with us should you need further clarification and we will be happy to assist you.
