The Future of IT Awaits: Your Guide to a Proactive IT Practice 

Let’s be real. The reactive, chaotic nature of old-school IT practices is no longer sufficient to meet the demands of enterprises in 2025. Tech is always changing, so IT must be able to keep up. It’s truly the end of IT as you know it.  

As most people in IT today can attest, IT teams have been trapped in a cycle of waiting for things to break, scrambling to fix them, and drowning in tickets—for years. Not only is this reactive approach inefficient but it is also costly. Not to mention drop-everything moments such as an executive’s device going down or a widespread IT outage.  

But what if IT could be different? What if you could get ahead of issues before they happen, slashing downtime, cutting costs, and making IT the hero? That’s where proactive IT estate management comes in. Indeed, proactive IT is the future of IT. 

What is Proactive IT? 

Proactive IT is your early warning system. Instead of waiting for end users to submit tickets, a proactive IT practice allows you to monitor, detect, and resolve issues before employees even notice them. The same holds true for keeping consumer-facing devices such as self-service kiosks and digital signage up and running. This approach not only reduces IT tickets but also mitigates digital risk, boosts productivity, and ensures a seamless digital experience for end users throughout your enterprise. 

The Journey to Proactive IT: The First 90 Days 

Every great transformation starts with a plan. Here’s how to move from reactive IT chaos to a proactive IT practice in just three months—even realizing value on Day 1: 

Day 1 of a Proactive IT Practice: The Discovery Phase 

Welcome to Proactive IT 101. Your first order of business on Day 1 is to uncover hidden issues. Digital employee experience (DEX) tools such as Lakeside SysTrack can turn your reactive IT chaos into proactive IT calm by surfacing the top issues in your IT estate. Within hours, you’ll have a clear picture of the issues affecting the most machines, highlighting the most critical to address right out of the gate. 

Days 2-30 of a Proactive IT Practice: Building Momentum 

Now that you have visibility, it’s time to start deflecting tickets before they happen. By leveraging telemetry data from endpoints and visualizing it through Lakeside SysTrack, IT teams can quickly pinpoint and address issues such as low disk space, poor Wi-Fi signals, or compute power deficiencies in real time. The goal here is to tackle the easy wins by identifying the top 5-10 problems affecting the most users and developing automations to fix the issues before they affect productivity or business continuity. 

Days 31-90 of a Proactive IT Practice: Amplifying the Value 

In this phase, organizations begin to operationalize the value they’ve gained from the first month of visibility. IT teams can focus on advancing their proactive capabilities by regularly reviewing SysTrack sensors to identify new issues and trends. This phase is about turning proactive IT into second nature, where the insights from the first month are applied across the entire IT estate. 

Case Studies: Proactive IT in Action 

Financial Services Case Study  

By adopting a proactive IT practice, a U.S.-based financial services organization has fine-tuned its automation strategy using Lakeside SysTrack. Once it started using automations, the company ran 585,940 a week, ultimately reducing that figure to 144,000 as they addressed the health of their endpoints. Today, by maturing their Proactive IT strategy, this financial services organization uses sensor-based automations that trigger only when issues arise.  

Healthcare Insurance Case Study 

A Lakeside SysTrack healthcare insurance customer with 400,000 employees leverages automation to ensure a secure, productive, and frictionless digital experience. Over the course of 30 days, 1.1 million sensor-driven automations addressed system hygiene issues, such as enabling Windows Search to prevent slow search times and ensuring Network Location Awareness for proper Active Directory (AD) functionality. These automations reduce IT tickets and enhance system reliability by enforcing policies at login. 

Empowering IT to Become a Strategic Business Enabler 

Proactive IT isn’t a one-time project – it’s a mindset shift. By harnessing real-time data, automation, and predictive insights, your IT team can eliminate disruptions before they happen, optimize costs, and deliver a seamless digital experience.  

Ready to take the leap? Start with visibility, prioritize high-impact fixes, and scale automation responsibly. Before you know it, your IT department won’t just be keeping up with business demands – you’ll be driving them.