Service Desk: Digital transformation is giving technology an increasingly important role in business results. This makes the IT industry and its resources as a whole demand special attention. After all, you must closely manage several processes and platforms to keep your business running smoothly.
That’s why the presence of the service desk grows more and more in companies. Still, not everyone knows how it works, and some doubts often arise. What exactly is the service desk? How does it work? What are your benefits? Is it worth implementing it?
What Is A Service Desk?
Every company has a minimal IT infrastructure. Even if it’s a single computer in a small business, you have to deal with several issues so that it meets the user’s needs. And as companies grow, that infrastructure becomes more complex — as does the number of users.
The service desk aims to centralize and manage all the operational support given to a company’s professionals who deal with a system. In other words, it seeks to unify all support to users to optimize the maintenance of the availability of services.
It is the basic foundation of an IT team, as it is at the service desk that most day-to-day problems will be resolved — whether incidents or support requests. In addition to dealing with more complex operational failures, it acts preventively.
After all, just as factory maintenance must correct but also avoid failures, the service desk seeks to minimize the chances of problems in IT. We’ll cover some essential industry practices below to understand how this works in a real-world environment.
The Database Operation
The availability of a company’s systems depends directly on how its database is managed. It is necessary to ensure that the data is accessible and that the processes involving this system are fast — in addition to, of course, secure.
All this is included in the service desk work. It keeps the environment with a high level of management, reliable and stable, ensuring satisfaction in data access and generating more value for the business.
Imagine a company that serves customers daily and needs to consult information, access applications, or close deals in the digital environment. Any operability issue causes huge — and harmful — impacts on revenue. Thus, the action of the service desk is essential to keep the business’s financial health up to date.
Database operation includes, for example, managing migration projects, performing corrective and preventive maintenance, monitoring system logs, creating and managing security backups, etc.
Security Management
Digital transformation has further accelerated the digitalization of companies’ internal and external processes. And despite the benefits this change has brought, new risks have emerged that need to be dealt with. Among those that require more attention is the issue of digital security.
Keeping database backups is just one of the service desk’s tasks that also pertains to security management — and, despite being a simple action, it is crucial to prevent the loss of sensitive data. In addition to the damage caused by a possible loss of information, it is necessary to deal with viruses and cyberattacks.
The service desk acts directly in the elaboration of a security plan. This means defining actions to correct damages and, above all, creating ways to prevent them from occurring. That is, the entire management of security software (antivirus and firewalls, for example), cybersecurity policies (physical and digital access controls), and other factors that help keep company data more secure. It is worth noting that this involves keeping up to date and making professionals aware of new threats, such as ransomware attacks.
The Network Operation
The type of service or product a company offers makes its internal operation take on specific characteristics. This means that the IT infrastructure must adapt to meet day-to-day demands.
In other words, each company’s network infrastructure is also added if an auto industry uses different machines than a textile factory. Thus, it is up to the service desk to remotely monitor all devices connected to the company’s network.
This involves managing hardware and software, whether computers, notebooks, or smartphones, as they represent gateways to relevant business information. The issue of security is directly linked to this management, but the network operation is even broader.
Also Read: How To Apply The Internet In Business Management?
