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IT pros—or shall we say, the real MVPs—are gearing up for an overloaded Big Game Monday, as hybrid employees say they’re planning on staying home after Super Bowl LVIII.
Game plan. Because of the uptick in remote work, IT employees are about to have one of the busiest days of the year for remote IT issues, according to a new report from Atera—an AI-powered platform for IT professionals that provides services like remote monitoring and help desk solutions.
Of the IT pros surveyed, 77% said they expect to see a “tsunami” of issues on the big day, first among them software outages (50%), followed by users clicking on phishing links (42%) and forgetting their passwords (37%).
“You definitely see a bit of brain fog. Specifically, the one that comes to mind is March Madness—especially because those games are happening during the workday,” Landon Gaines, an enterprise solutions engineer at Cimpress Technology, told IT Brew.
Cough, cough. 41% of hybrid employees surveyed said they’d call out or work remotely on Big Game Monday. Their excuse? More than half of those said they’d either tell their manager they were under the weather or that they had an “appointment.” Of those who will show up to work, 31% said they expected to be groggy and 25% expected to be cranky on the morning after.
Half of remote or hybrid respondents also said they’d be more likely to use their personal computers and devices while working from home, which could leave them vulnerable to phishing attacks and other cyber threats if they don’t have proper measures in place—like updated antivirus software.
“I’ve been a part of the BYOD—Bring Your Own Device—environment before,” Gaines said. “And that has its challenges for sure, because, who knows? When you have a personal device, you’re not able to manage that remotely from an IT administrator standpoint.”
While some employees take off for holidays or sporting events, IT teams are often left holding down the help desk. Two-thirds of IT pros in the US agreed it’s harder to take days off compared to colleagues in other departments, which could easily lead to burnout. Even so, IT pros like Gaines say they’re generally well-equipped to mitigate and solve all kinds of issues.
“IT professionals, we want our users to succeed—and we want them to have the proper tools they need to get the job done,” he said. “If they’re putting themselves in situations that we don’t recommend, we’re going to do our best to protect our environment because we are both the first line of defense and the last line of defense.”
Here’s hoping your Big Game Monday is full of some nice recoveries, saves, and—fingers crossed—zero (data) interceptions.