The importance of redundancy of IT professionals: Avoiding disruptions and ensuring continuity

Introduction

In today’s digital era, businesses heavily rely on the smooth functioning of their IT systems and infrastructure for efficient operations. From managing databases to monitoring servers and clusters, IT professionals form the backbone of the tech infrastructure, ensuring that all systems and services run optimally. However, I have worked and knowledge about small, medium and BIG companies that face (or ignore) a common problem of not having redundancy of IT professionals to administrate critical systems like databases, monitoring, kubernetes, networking, storage or any other specific system.

I always advocate how crucial it is to have a team of professionals working together who can share responsibilities, provide coverage, and avoid over-burdening individuals with constant on-call responsibilities instead of relying on one person. Emphasizing the importance of IT professionals redundancy is a wise investment for businesses seeking resilience and steady operations for the long term which will avoid disruptions in business operations and ensure the continuity of service delivery.

But often, companies still have ONLY ONE PERSON in charge of a specific system, and when this person takes a vacation, it can lead to significant disruptions. There are a few primary situations that companies face in such cases.

1. The company might stop working altogether (stand-by mode) since no changes can be made to the database or kubernetes clusters until the responsible person comes back.
2. There is some “kind of express three-day capacitation” before the vacation day, which often fails to provide adequate training to people not familiar with the systems.
3. The professional goes on vacation, but they need to be attentive to the company calls, emails, and chats, which can be stressful and detract from the enjoyment of their time off.

In conclusion, if your company falls into any of the 03 cases mentioned above, your business needs to recognize the importance of redundancy in both its technology infrastructure and IT personnel. Having a redundancy of IT professionals can go beyond ensuring system continuity. It can also provide a competitive advantage in the market because companies that have a competent and dedicated IT team with redundancies in place can:

• Easily respond to new technological trends.
• Implement new systems and services with ease.
• Handle massive amounts of data and requests quickly.