OnPage News: Critical Messages
OnPage Corporation is the Secure Messaging/Critical Alerts Leader: Learn More…
As an IT Professional, receiving mission Critical Alerts & Critical Messages Real-Time can be the difference between company Up-Time & Down-Time.
You need to ensure that you receive these alerts promptly and effectively in order to ensure operations are running smoothly. To accomplish this, you must first increase your response rates to these critical messages. This can be done by starting with these four, very important actions.
- Separate your critical messages from your regular message flow. You want your critical messages to stand out from the hundreds of messages the average person receives each day.
Your business-critical messages need to stand out from the crowd, and not get lost in the firehose of email most IT managers receive every day. An easy way to accomplish this is to add a dedicated email address just for your most critical server alerts or messages. Have your RMM, or servers send the critical messages to this special dedicated address, rather than the regular email addresses of your team members. Having critical messages segregated makes them stand out from less important communications, and will prevent them from being missed in the flow of less important messages.
- Critical messages need to be seen and addressed quickly- by definition. Ensure your IT team notices, and acts upon pending problems as soon as they come in with an alert tone when messages arrive, and a solution optimized for mobile management.
Your team needs to have a distinguishable and persistent alert that will immediately grab their attention and will keep them from ever missing a message. Using SMS or standard email for critical alerts is not best practice. This is especially true for messages that come in during off hours- when your IT staff might be less diligent about checking messages. Because the pace of modern business is measured in 24 hour days your critical messaging policy has to center around a mobile-first solution because that is how your team will be responding during the most critical times “off hours” when staffing and attention are at their lowest, and your vulnerability is at its highest.
- Make certain a redundancy is in place for the person on duty by having a backup person that receives the alerts if those didn’t get handled timely.
Nothing ever goes as planned so always make sure you have a backup or redundancy plan in place. If someone cannot receive messages, you need to have a system in place where you can either send or forward that message on to another user to ensure the message does not go ignored.
- Have a system in place for acknowledging messages. Having audit trails or quick responses can let the team know you received the page and can improve response rates drastically.
Knowing if and when the message gets received is vital. Have a system in place where the sender of the message can see the exact time and date of when the message was received. Or ensure quick responses to let the team know you received the message and are taking action. Not having any message acknowledgment can delay response rates immensely. A record of message delivery and response times is also valuable for determining appropriate staffing levels, and for failure analysis in case anything goes wrong.
About OnPage:
OnPage is the industry leading Smartphone application system for Global, High-Priority, Real-Time Enterprise Messaging, Cybersecurity Intrusion Compliance, and IT Alert Management. The OnPage application addresses the need for critical incident response management and secure, time-sensitive messages.
OnPage takes mobile communications to the next level with the latest all-in-one-app features, including the ability to set priority levels for each message to ensure the High-Priority messages receive immediate attention. Additionally, the new web-based On-Call scheduling management tool enables enterprise users to plan ahead and route prioritized messages to the right person, on the right day, at the right time.
Thousands of IT Professionals, healthcare providers, doctors, field engineers, law enforcement, nurses, emergency responders and disaster recovery teams depend on OnPage rock solid reliability every day.
Leading corporations, including Blue Chip organizations, have adopted OnPage for critical alerts and secure messaging.
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