Moeller says e-mail is one of the most important applications in his network so he pays special attention to its performance. "I don't just monitor whether the server is up or down but how the information store is doing," he says. "The server might be working fine, but if the information store is full, no one will get their messages."

He also uses monitoring tools to keep a close eye on student applications and the school's financial programs.

Monitoring tools help him ensure that enterprise disk space is always available. He has set capacity limits on all mission-critical storage and if thresholds are reached, the monitoring tools send out alerts to the team's cell phones and pagers. "If our servers and storage went to 100 percent capacity, we'd be dead in the water," he says.

2. Beef up your network protection

Jon Gossels, president of SystemsExperts Corp., a consulting firm in Sudbury, Mass., says IT groups must rethink the way they tackle network security. "The days of the hardened perimeter are long, long gone. With so many connections to outside users, there is no such thing as a tough outside anymore," he says.