Fatigue affects us all. People in stressful jobs often suffer from “burnout,” especially if they perform shift work, as nurses and doctors do. Professional soccer managers worry about overplaying their players, as higher rates of injury occur when players are in the “red zone,” meaning they’re overworked. Similarly, “load management” has become a much-discussed topic in basketball. And college students agonize over whether to cram all night for an exam or get a good night’s sleep. (The answer here is to start studying weeks before the exam, but who’s going to do that?!)
These examples illustrate that fatigue is an issue for everyone, so why would IT teams be different? But IT fatigue can have uniquely damaging ramifications
What Is IT Fatigue?
IT fatigue, also called technology or digital fatigue, is a state of mental, and sometimes emotional, exhaustion experienced by IT professionals and those who rely heavily on technology. The constant need to interact with and adapt to an ever-increasing number of information technology tools, systems and updates can overwhelm and exhaust these professionals. The resulting fatigue results from the cognitive overload of juggling multiple applications, virtual communication platforms and the “always-on” nature of modern work, leading to decreased productivity, stress and burnout.
What Are the Consequences of IT Fatigue?
Fatigue is difficult to quantify. For example, how can you determine if an error is the result of an IT worker being tired as opposed to being unqualified, or just a random mistake? Nevertheless, there are professional estimates.
Looking at fatigue generally, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine published a study that found employee burnout costs U.S. employers an average of $4,257 for an average nonmanagerial salaried employee. In IT environments, fatigue often results in downtime for an organization’s systems. And downtime costs Global 2000 companies $400B annually.
How Deep Freeze Can Help
There are many actions organizations can take to help reduce IT fatigue. If you’re an employer and you can afford to give your IT employees more days off, that would be fantastic. But that’s not always practical, especially not for medium- and small-sized companies.
Furthermore, even more time off can’t fully ameliorate issues like seemingly unending break/fix cycles. Sure, an extra four days off is nice, but will it really prevent burnout if IT professionals feel like Sisyphus for all the days they’re at work, pushing that giant boulder of helpdesk tickets up the Hill of Troubleshooting?
Enter: Deep Freeze.
Faronics Deep Freeze directly combats IT fatigue by drastically reducing the number of repetitive, time-consuming tasks that overload IT staff. Deep Freeze uses patented Reboot-to-Restore technology to make endpoints — desktops, laptops, kiosks and other workstations — indestructible. This mitigates IT fatigue in three key ways:
- Massive reduction in helpdesk tickets: Deep Freeze ensures that upon every reboot, a device instantly resets to an original, pristine configuration. This eliminates the vast majority of user-induced issues immediately and automatically. This includes accidental setting changes, unwanted software installations and malware. In fact, Deep Freeze helps reduce IT helpdesk tickets by 63%, freeing up IT staff from endless troubleshooting of recurring, trivial problems.
- Elimination of zero-day threats and malware cleanup: The product automatically reverses malicious changes to a system, including those from zero-day threats, with a simple restart. This removes the stress and cognitive drain on IT staff that comes from urgently having to isolate, troubleshoot and re-image machines compromised by security breaches.
- Preventing configuration drift: By reverting a system to a known good state after every session, Deep Freeze eliminates configuration drift — the slow, painful accumulation of minor, unauthorized changes that drag workstations down into the abyss of instability. This saves the IT team from the tiring (and, frankly, annoying) work of manual system maintenance.
The Fourth Key Way: Break/Fix Cycles
Actually, Deep Freeze can alleviate IT fatigue in four major ways, but the fourth deserves its own section.
The break/fix cycle is a reactive model of IT management where professionals only take action after a system, device or network component has already failed, malfunctioned or been compromised. That means IT departments forfeit the benefits of being proactive. The result is unpredictable and high-cost emergency service calls, often leading to extended periods of lost productivity and revenue due to unexpected system downtime.
How Deep Freeze Stops the Break/Fix Cycle
Faronics Deep Freeze directly disrupts this cycle by automatically solving the vast majority of user-induced problems at the root, making the IT function proactive, not reactive. Deep Freeze turns the high-stress, unpredictable model of waiting for a breakdown into a guaranteed, automated restoration upon every reboot, allowing IT teams to escape exhaustion.
Ready to stop frantically putting out fires and adopt a calmer, more cost-effective IT maintenance strategy? Reach out to the Faronics team and reduce fatigue better than any energy drink ever could.
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