Reliance on “fire-and-forget” alerting leaving companies with higher risk of business interruption

Potsdam, Germany, 12th May 2011: Derdack (www.derdack.com), provider of advanced enterprise notification software today announced a survey of IT executives has revealed significant potential for adoption of industry best practice and products for the management of enterprise alert notifications. Companies are currently focused on one way, ‘fire and forget’ notifications from helpdesk and IT monitoring solutions which lead to a greater risk of interruption to business critical systems.

Matthes Derdack, Managing Director of Derdack said, “Companies are relying on rudimentary fire and forget notifications rather than taking a holistic view of the best practices for managing and controlling the notification lifecycle. With the importance of IT at the enterprise level increasing, there is a greater focus on improving IT infrastructure management which will lead to growth in the use of next generation notification solutions. By using unified communications and advanced intelligence in notification delivery and support for smartphones and instant messaging technologies, it is now even easier for IT staff to remotely acknowledge, diagnose and resolve critical incidents before they can impact the business.”

Derdack interviewed 264 IT executives in Europe and North America, key findings include:

30% do not use any kind of IT alert notifications

Of those that do notify, 70% use built-in, basic features such as “fire-and-forget” emails produced by an IT monitoring product such as Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or an in-house-developed solution

68% of these companies do not track if a notification message actually gets delivered, e.g. to a mobile phone nor do they processes responses

73% do not use advanced features such as automated escalation chains or closed-loop notifications

The most common notification channels in use are email (93%) and SMS text messaging (53%)

There is room for increased adoption of technologies such as instant messaging (used by 26%) and Smartphone ‘push’ (14%)

The survey highlighted that many companies still rely on a very basic level of notifications and do not have a good understanding of the capabilities provided by next generation notification products. For example, management of notifications is usually limited to enabling outbound distribution. Comparatively few companies are closing the loop and using automated processes to ensure that any issues are brought to the attention of the right engineer or technician, and escalated where necessary until the issue is recognized and resolved. An understanding of the availability and benefits of persistent and intelligent notification workflows is still to be developed.

Steve Craggs, an independent analyst at Lustratus added, “Companies need to work smarter with SMS and email notifications but often lack the skills or knowledge to achieve this. There is therefore significant market potential for the next generation of notification solutions. Implementing a product that uses automated notifications, following closed loop principles and using unified communications will provide major benefits for systems availability and reliability.”

Mr Derdack concluded, “We often talk to companies that want to consolidate their distributed SMS and email notification systems but this is only a fraction of what can be achieved by a modern notification solution. However, when we demonstrate the automation and escalation functions of message master® Enterprise Alert, companies immediately appreciate how it can reduce the risk of business interruption and improve business continuity.”

Derdack is launching a unique Enterprise Notification Conference on 23-24 May, 2011 to explore the world of enterprise notifications and the benefits of communication-enabling business processes and applications. For more details and registration, visit http://www.derdack.de/index.php?article_id=223&clang=0.