Strengthening IT service management: Building resilience against outages
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Strengthening IT service management: Building resilience against outages
Effie Bagourdi
27 January 2025
7 min read
Effie Bagourdi
27 January 2025
7 min read
The CrowdStrike outage on July 19, 2024, which affected 8.5 million devices and cost Fortune 500 companies an estimated $5.4 billion, served as a wake-up call for organizations worldwide. In response, many are critically reassessing their service management strategies to bolster resilience against future disruptions. This incident underscored the need for swift issue resolution and transparent communication with employees, stakeholders, and clients about resolution timelines. Understanding the scope and root cause of incidents is crucial for extracting insights and preparing for future challenges.
Today, we're excited to launch new research that reveals how recent incidents have reshaped IT service management strategies to prevent similar large-scale disruptions. Dive into our full report: Crash Course in Chaos: How Tech Teams Are Building Robust IT Strategies for Greater Digital Resilience.
Jira Service Management (JSM) is a powerful tool for organizations aiming to enhance their service delivery and communication efforts. By seamlessly integrating JSM, you enable effective collaboration across your development, operations, support, and IT teams. Service teams can efficiently address customer issues by linking JSM tickets to Jira issues, ensuring swift developer intervention when needed. Additionally, development teams can actively engage by viewing and commenting on service project issues, fostering a cohesive and responsive support environment.
Empowering IT with visibility and automation
Effective incident management requires comprehensive visibility, actionable insights, and automation across IT operations. Advanced monitoring tools offer full-stack observability and transform data into actionable insights in real-time, empowering IT teams to manage and prevent outages more efficiently. Without these capabilities, identifying the source of service disruptions becomes challenging.
Learn what you should consider putting in place to mitigate such incidents and how to manage one if all else fails - Poor major incident management could put your organisation at security risk
Centralized recovery planning
Centralizing recovery plans and resources streamlines access to the tools needed for rapid recovery from IT outages. This approach not only prepares organizations for future incidents but also ensures accountability, backed by an audit trail to support decisions and outcomes. Recovery plans should be documented in the company’s central knowledge management system (such as Confluence) but be replicated to other document systems to ensure they remain accessible during any type of disruption
Proactive monitoring for resilience
While digitalization brings opportunities, it also poses risks of outages. Proactive monitoring is key to mitigating these risks. By enabling preventative maintenance, teams can address issues before they escalate into outages. Although not a complete safeguard, comprehensive monitoring provides continuous visibility into IT environments, allowing for faster issue resolution and shorter outage durations. A practical solution is to implement a centralized hub that integrates out of the box all of your monitoring systems and provides a unified alerting platform such as Atlassian’s Statuspage.
Enhancing service management with the right tools
Leveraging the right tools can elevate service management capabilities. Atlassian's Statuspage ensures smooth customer experiences even during service disruptions by facilitating real-time communication and integrating seamlessly with existing monitoring and support tools. This helps maintain customer trust and brand reputation.
Integrating Jira and Jira service management
Combining Jira with Jira Service Management (JSM) creates a robust solution for minimizing downtime and enhancing service delivery. JSM's integration with Jira allows for the automatic routing of critical issues to development teams based on predefined criteria, enabling prioritization based on severity. Features like incident conference calls and chat channels further support collaborative resolution efforts, reducing mean time to resolution for major incidents.
Can you use both Jira and JSM? Find out more
Preparing for future service disruptions
In today's fast-paced digital landscape, a service outage can significantly impact a company's reputation. While it's impossible to eliminate service disruptions entirely, proactive strategies and best practices can mitigate their effects. By implementing robust service management solutions, businesses can maintain high levels of customer service, preserving reputation and trust.
In conclusion, the CrowdStrike outage served as a pivotal moment for the software industry, prompting necessary changes in service management practices. As we continue to learn from this event, it is crucial to implement strategies that address cultural and structural challenges to mitigate future risks. By doing so, we can ensure that we are better prepared to handle similar incidents and continue to improve the resilience of our global ecosystem.
Prepare for future service disruptions
Connect with us to ensure your organization is ready to handle future service disruptions.
Written by
Effie Bagourdi
Head of Service Management Practice
With 15 year's experience in IT and service management, Effie is an ITIL4 professional with a track record in highly regulated industries such as banking. Leading our service management practice, Effie is passionate about leveraging AI to elevate customer experience.
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