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How the Cloud Is Killing Traditional Help Desk

As we enter the cloud era, most people are focused on what, where, and why when it comes to cloud. They want to know; how do I architect it? How do I migrate to it? And how do I operate it? Once the transition is made, the question is then, how does it affect how I support my users? Also, what is the impact to my Help Desk team? Given a cloud framework, operations people need to be considered differently. Their positions were created to deal with issues IT already knew about. However, cloud changes the game. Since so much of the cloud is hidden, you can’t just refer to a guidebook to get some help, thus you do lose some sense of control. For example, if Office 365 rolls out a new update, when users connect it will look different because it updates automatically, and the users might not know what to do.

The issue is that today the traditional structured tiers of Help Desk aren’t the same. The old model won’t work anymore. In a traditional help desk model, Tier 1 handles the simpler questions while Tier 2 handles the more difficult, escalated challenges. But with the cloud, if the Help Desk cannot solve the issue, then they become the user and must open a ticket with the vendor or cloud provider, thus making coordination more difficult and less efficient.

That is not to say that transitioning to the cloud doesn’t have many perks and can greatly contribute to efficiency. But it’s crucial to plan for the impact that your company’s cloud strategy will have on your Help Desk and end user support.  There are a variety of variables that must be considered when moving to the cloud, including more training, re-architecting the way Help Desk is built, and turning it into a Help Hub. Help Desk is changing drastically: it is the hub for communications and you need to be able to provide that conduit to other, additional help avenues and take incident ownership to maximize your users’ productivity. During our recent webinar, How the Cloud Is Killing Traditional Help Desk, we dove deeper into this and provided you with the questions that should be asked and the solutions to common cloud-era Help Desk challenges.