Tech burnout? These four key tools can help you avoid it!

A 2022 study of more than 36,200 IT professionals across 33 countries, conducted by a mental wellbeing platform Yerbo, shows an alarming trend: 2 in 5 of workers are at high risk of burnout, prompted by longer hours, more demanding workloads and conflicts in work-life balance. What’s truly staggering is that more than half of the respondents (62%) admit to feeling emotionally and physically drained. 56% of IT professionals can’t relax once their workday is over¹.

Leaving the human aspect aside, this poses a serious issue for businesses globally, as evidenced first by the Great Resignation trend in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the subsequent Quiet Quitting phenomenon. While the job demands become more significant than the resources IT employees have at their disposal to accomplish them, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that more and more workers shift toward doing the bare minimum of what is required of their jobs and putting in no more time, effort, or enthusiasm than absolutely necessary.

For many IT professionals who are tasked with managing corporate networks on a day-to-day basis, the key challenge lies in more strain being placed on their networks, creating a vicious cycle in which more and more management and maintenance is required. Putting it simply: the more the users, devices, locations, and applications, the more time-consuming manual tasks, potential connectivity issues, security risks, and… frustration.

And yet, there’s a common problem shared by many IT teams which aren’t given more (or better) tools to ensure their networks live up to expectations. As stress, fatigue and tension rise, human errors become more likely. Best case scenario, the result is just poor overall network performance and inferior user experience. In the worst case, our cybersecurity posture may suffer, leading to an increased risk of a successful attack.

In today’s distributed working environment, IT administrators need modern tools just as much, as regular employees require reliable connectivity. To address the problem of the growing complexity of enterprise networks, create efficiencies with the available resources, and reduce the stress and risk of burnout among their IT teams, companies and organizations have a myriad of options to choose from.

However, what we at Extreme Networks have seen first-hand provide the best results for our customers, allowing them to manage their network resources effectively and efficiently, are the following:

First of all, your IT team needs visibility into your entire network, including your wired and wireless networks, as well as your SD-WAN. A cloud-based network management platform gives them the capability to see their entire organization at once. A single-vendor network management application unites your entire end-to-end network – branch, data center, cloud – simplifying management significantly compared to managing multiple, disparate resources.

Nothing frustrates users more than poor performance. A cloud-native SD-WAN ensures connectivity and application performance are constantly optimized across your WAN, and multi-cloud environments, anywhere your workers are located. Applications are detected automatically, traffic routing and prioritization are handled through performance-based dynamic WAN selection. It’s a win-win: users have better experiences, and IT doesn’t have to worry about application performance or connectivity issues.

As your network environment becomes increasingly complex, visibility isn’t enough. AI brings network intelligence to IT admins, identifying hardware, software, or user anomalies that could impact network or application performance. Rather than manually seeking out problems, IT is pointed directly to the source and can address issues before they impact performance.

Extreme Networks developed a fabric technology to provide a better IT experience, by enabling a unified, automated, and secure environment for wired, wireless and SD-WAN networks. The Extreme Fabric Connect solution is highly scalable and can extend across multiple locations from the remote branch to the data center and connects different device types using IEEE-standard protocols. Delivered with built-in automation that speeds up network operations for faster deployment all the way to the edge, to allow easier troubleshooting, and attain better resiliency.

There really isn’t one. If you’re ready to take your networking to the next level – and reduce burnout risk among your IT organization – give them proper tools to manage and operate the network more efficiently and effectively . They will be happier and less likely to become frustrated or make costly mistakes. As an added bonus, your entire user base will benefit from a next-generation, cloud-managed network that can handle today’s demands!