The term ‘managed services’ has been around in the IT industry for a fair few years now. The level of importance placed on managed services varies from business to business and is directly related to how a company prioritises the efficiency and performance of their IT network and infrastructure.
For many companies, the more traditional break-fix mantra of, ‘When it is broken, we will get the “IT guys” in to fix it,’ is the extent of their IT strategy. In recent years, the more forward thinking organisations recognise the importance of keeping their IT systems running efficiently, to minimise downtime. Unfortunately, relying purely on a break-fix approach can be risky.
The majority of the time, just reacting to problems that have already occurred is too late. Productivity has been diminished, data has been lost and downtime has had an impact. Consider these real life scenarios:
Scenario 1
Backups have failed and have for the last few weeks but without proper monitoring, nobody noticed. It is only when the HDD gives up the ghost that the company discovers the loss of invoices, product orders, communications and more.
Scenario 2
A spam bot attacks the exchange server because the firewall isn’t being monitored. This creates a spam relay causing the customer’s domain to be blacklisted. The ISP terminates service and the internet and email shut down.
Scenario 3
A virus has hit the network due to the server anti-virus expiring over a month ago. Due to the lack of monitoring and management, this has escalated into the users not being able to start their workstations up until everything has been cleaned.
The ability to strategically look forward, for many IT departments is a tricky task, mainly due to various operational and commercial pressures. However, in order to enhance and maintain technology performance, planned monitoring will ensure that corporate objectives are met and, more importantly, reduce the exposure to risk.
‘But it is too expensive!’ I hear you cry….IT purchases are often about justifying upfront costs for hardware and software. After those expensive purchases, it is rare that a company would monitor the performance of the costly kit and just rely on the vendor’s claims. This makes little sense after spending so much putting the kit in place.
In fact, for a modest monthly fee, monitoring will allow you to:
- Analyse historical trends to enable data driven insights and decisions
- Prevent outages rather than fight fires
- Increase productivity and run at peak performance
- Plan and budget for future upgrades
- Minimise downtime and save money
Perhaps more importantly, a managed service provider, such as Netshield take on all the risk for you. When your systems are running at peak performance, you are happy and so are we!
Contact us to enquire about a health check or to find out more about our monthly NetManage rates.
