What does a 24/7 operation mean for IT support?

It means deciding in advance what happens at three in the morning, and telling the people who work then. A continuous operation with business-hours-only IT support has a gap for two thirds of the day, and that gap is usually discovered by a supervisor on a night shift with nobody to call.

The decision is not automatically to buy round-the-clock staffed support, which is more than many operators need. It is to be explicit: what is monitored continuously, what triggers a call out, who answers, and what the night shift can resolve themselves. Our own security operations centre runs 24/7 for monitoring, and the practical arrangement for any given operator is agreed rather than assumed.

A runbook does more work than most operators expect and costs nothing but the writing. A single page covering the recurring issues, how to switch to the backup connection, which device to restart, how to fall back to manual dispatch, and who to call for what, resolves a substantial share of night incidents without escalation. Write it with the people who work those hours, because they know what actually goes wrong and they will use their own version regardless.

Maintenance needs the same explicit treatment. In a continuous operation there is no quiet window, only a least-bad one, and it should be identified from your actual movement patterns rather than assumed to be Sunday night. Agree it, schedule there, and tell the shift beforehand, because an unannounced planned outage generates exactly the same panic as a real one. If you want after-hours cover sized to how you actually run, call 1800 456 567.