Most businesses do not appreciate network uptime until it is down.\u00a0 Few people realize how much loss can occur when the network or servers are not operating correctly until they see entire departments of people idle and searching for something to fill their time while repairs are put into effect.<\/p>\n
CDW took a look at the problem in a survey run last year and released recently.\u00a0 In their 2010 CDW Business Continuity Straw Poll, CDW asked 7,099 IT managers about uptime and 1,794 reported they had experienced a network disruption of more than four hours since July 2009.\u00a0 The survey was closed after obtaining 200 completed responses from SMB\u2019s with over 100 employees.<\/p>\n
Two major take-away points from the report:<\/p>\n
Enter ITIL<\/strong>, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library.\u00a0 ITIL is concerned with best practices surrounding the management of information technology.\u00a0 As a certification path, it starts out with the Foundations level which establishes, well, a foundation of BP understanding and an important overview of the landscape.<\/p>\n From there, important information technology service management (ITSM) issues are covered at the Intermediate level.\u00a0 One of them is the ITIL Planning, Protection and Optimization course<\/a> which covers such mission-critical subjects as capacity management, availability management, IT service continuity management, information security management and demand management.\u00a0 Sound familiar?\u00a0 Probably because these are the things that would have saved those 1,794 IT manager\u2019s.<\/p>\n More to the point, these are the things that would have saved $1.7 billion of loss last year.\u00a0 Considering the cost of obtaining ITIL certification in order to implement these management best practices, the business case is more than established<\/strong>.<\/p>\n On top of it, ITIL training doesn\u2019t have to be expensive or time consuming.\u00a0 Travel and in-person expenses are easily saved through providers like GogoTraining<\/a>, an APMG ITIL authorized training organization (ATO), who delivers online, self-paced ITIL v3 certification training courses<\/a>.\u00a0 Due to a unique business model and the savings afforded with online delivery, GogoTraining courses\u00a0are among the most affordable on the market (online courses are in the low hundreds!).<\/strong>\u00a0 For ITIL, you can get the ITIL v3 Foundation for $448 (two courses on a buy-one-get-one package) and then enough Intermediate courses to fulfill the credit requirement to sit for Intermediate certification, all for mere hundreds of dollars.\u00a0 To save hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars?\u00a0\u00a0There isn’t much to argue\u00a0on that point.\u00a0<\/p>\n