Buying a home requires thoughtful planning and takes a significant amount of time and resources. Beyond your list of must-haves, you’ve likely kept tabs on houses of interest to you, the state of the market, how safe the neighborhood is, and more. Another factor in your decision is how the house is equipped to grow with you—will it continue to meet your needs in the next five years? It’s critical to establish a sound foundation that works for you today and in the future.
A similar level of consideration should be applied when selecting a new IT Service Management (ITSM) platform or reviewing your existing investment. This decision shouldn’t solely apply to your needs and environment today, it also requires you to evaluate the business’ vision for the future and how the platform can accommodate your organization’s growth.
One key aspect to consider when futureproofing your service desk boils down to security. How can your ITSM platform help your organization embrace more secure practices? Let’s start by considering a cloud-based architecture.
A New Construction Home in the Cloud
While everyone’s wants and needs differ, there are perks to purchasing a new construction home. A major advantage is working directly with the builder to customize aspects of your house, from the floor plan to the paint and tile, so you can design your home with the features you value. Looking past the design components, there’s the added bonus of installing new materials and the latest appliances, helping to lower ongoing maintenance and repairs.
Similar to the advantages of a new-build home, the cloud presents an opportunity for you to tailor the environment and your service offerings to your organization’s culture and objectives. While the technology landscape and our work environments are evolving, we’ve also witnessed security threats grow more sophisticated—but the ways in which teams can combat and harden their security has also matured. A cloud-based ITSM solution can enable your organization to innovate your service offerings in a more agile and secure fashion, especially as teams navigate hybrid infrastructures and become more geographically diverse.
What are some of the key benefits your organization could gain from investing in a cloud-based service desk?
- Enhanced Scalability: Regardless of your organization’s size or service maturity, the service desk can be molded and configured in alignment with your growing needs. Manipulating your configuration can be done organically and instantaneously, without disrupting your users’ experience with expensive or time-consuming changes.
- Streamlined Upgrades and Enhancements: With a multi-tenant solution, a cloud-based service desk especially ensures you’re leveraging the latest version. Your ITSM vendor is responsible for testing and rolling out new features, removing the onus from your team to manage an upgrade. This helps to eliminate the need for potential downtime and maintains hyper-availability of the service desk to your users.
- Lower Maintenance and Overhead: Your cloud-based ITSM vendor delivers maintenance and upgrades to the system while monitoring performance. This shift in responsibilities enables your team to spend more time focusing on business-critical needs and how the service desk can support those endeavors—ultimately boosting productivity and the quality of the services you deliver.
- Greater Collaboration: Particularly as more businesses embrace hybrid in-person and remote work environments, cloud-based ITSM solutions can help optimize communication regardless of where users are located. Extending communication channels can eliminate service silos, inciting more cross-functional visibility and collaboration.
- Heightened Security: Centralizing your services and data with a cloud-hosted service desk expands the teams’ visibility, empowering them to introduce more automated methods of securing their ecosystem.
Long-Term Investments to Your Home – Securing Your ITSM Environment
Once the house is purchased, you can outline your to-do list for home improvement projects. These may range from new paint or landscaping to installing smart locks and new appliances. Regardless the change, these upgrades show your continued investment to improve the quality of your home for the long haul.
As you settle into your ITSM platform, consider the ways you can prepare your organization against future risks by implementing more secure measures within your service management practices. While security may not have been your initial goal in selecting a service desk, introducing modern and automated forms of security can protect your users, data, and environment for the future.
User Provisioning and Access
A great place to start is with users and access. Review the steps you’ve taken to secure who can use your ITSM platform and what can they see. Perhaps this has been a manual process, where you’ve worked off a spreadsheet or created individual credentials with the appropriate permissions and restrictions. As you evaluate ways to improve security through your service desk, consider integrating your active directory or identity management solution to streamline user provisioning, deprovisioning, and data access. Connecting your user registries to your ITSM platform ensures your userbase is current while capturing key user attributes (like their department, who they report to, and where they’re located). This information helps automate access rights and visibility to various modules in the platform, while eliminating manual data entry.
To further your security initiatives, consider implementing login policies such as single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA). SSO gives users a seamless experience to access the service desk, alleviating the need for employees to remember another password, driving value and traffic to the platform. Beyond improving the efficacy of access no matter where they are, SSO can also mitigate potential security risks when paired with MFA, requiring users to provide several pieces of evidence to confirm their identities. Using more modern approaches to user access and enrollment helps maintain user productivity, while locking down your environment to prevent future security threats.
Automation and Security in the Service Desk
Generally, teams look to their ITSM platform to streamline incident routing or legacy internal workflows. But have you investigated how your ITSM suite could help to enhance how you escalate potential security issues or prevent against future threats?
Review your automation rules. While these have traditionally focused on conditions to route tickets and requests to the appropriate technician, automation rules could also be devised to call attention to potential security concerns. Defining criteria such as where the incident originated, if it contains specific language, or was sent from a specific user, allows your team to scope what actions should be triggered for the appropriate escalation path.
Leveraging automations can eliminate manual triage and ensure timely handling of potential problems. There are also other smart features you can look to, like AI-powered recommendations. Based on historical events, suggestions for viable knowledge documentation or related dependencies, can guide technicians to resolve incidents or develop change enablement plans more efficiently. These features can also be used for teams to take a more proactive approach for problem and change management, to help maintain business continuity.
Don’t rest on your service management laurels. As technology advances, environments grow more complex, and the challenges you face become more diverse, explore solutions to help you futureproof your ITSM operations. When evaluating your service desk, look to cloud-based providers as a new outlet to fuel more secure service management.
