COVID-19 has left colleges and universities scrambling to come up with alternative plans for the 2020 fall semester. Some are opting for 100% online learning while others are taking more of a hybrid approach with a combination of in person and online classes.

While schools face an abundance of change this academic year, it’s not just the faculty and students that need to adapt but also the entire IT infrastructure for which the school is run.

In fact, just last week many schools started classes and were met with technical difficulties as there was a widespread outage at Zoom which caused major issues for students and teachers who were kicking off their first week back. Think about the mass chaos that must have ensued as IT departments across the industry were inundated with phone calls, messages and emails from teachers and students struggling to get up and running for their first class.

While traditionally, educational institutions have been slow to adapt when it comes to expanding their IT infrastructure, there are a few simple steps that can be taken to make the process more efficient:

Here are our best practices for maximizing your IT team’s bandwidth when issues arise:

Invest in a quality and reliable incident management tool. It’s imperative to use tools that you know will function properly when things aren’t going right. For example, if your email server is down, how do you plan on sending an email notification to your users? Having a system in place that you know will always be available to you is top priority for putting out fires before they start.

Provide transparent communication. We live in a world today where consumers digest information across a multitude of channels. Embrace this and connect with your users the way they like. Whether it’s text messaging, email or social media make sure you are providing flexibility to ensure your message gets read.

Know what downtime and outages are costing you. When a problem goes down, help tickets go up. Understanding and acknowledging the real cost of downtime is one of the first steps to being able to solve problems that are directly impacting your bottom line. Want to know what your downtime costs you? Check out our ROI calculator.

You’d be shocked to hear about the number of IT dinosaurs still email blasting by CC. How easily mistakes can happen that way. Totally inefficient, non-targeted and just plain annoying are just a few things that come to mind when we learn about the archaic practices still being utilized when it comes to incident management.

Think you’re ready to bring your school’s IT infrastructure into the 21st century? Contact us today to learn more about how StatusCast can help you. Better yet, signup for a free 14 day trial!

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