For small businesses, a few hours of IT downtime can mean a loss of business and frustration for employees and customers alike. It’s far better to tackle problems before they become a crisis and ensure that your IT systems are running as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
Summary
Managed IT support cuts downtime by identifying potential problems before they occur. By using monitoring tools on your servers and PCs, it can alert you to problems such as a disk getting too hot or a disk’s health deteriorating. Regular automatic patches will also prevent malicious software taking advantage of known gaps in software. Agreed response times mean help arrives quickly, and testing the backups and checking the health of the network are also key components of a proactive management approach that usually costs far less than fixing a crisis.
Proactive Hardware Monitoring
Early warning signs on your servers and workstations can be picked up by managed support tools continuously monitoring your IT estate. For example a rising disk temperature or a drop in a hard drive’s health score below a safe threshold. Finding out a hard drive has failed at 80% health is far better than finding out when it has actually failed and your machine won’t boot.
Automatic Patching
Unpatched software is the most common way for malware to enter into a business network. By applying updates on a nightly basis managed IT providers can keep their clients up to date on a day to day basis without any disruption to business. The UK government’s cyber security body also recommends guidance on patching and vulnerability management to provide a safe way of applying updates.
Fast Incident Response
When something does go wrong, time is of the essence. As a general rule, SLAs for managed support are set out in terms of hours (anywhere between 30 minutes and 4 hours depending on the severity of the issue). Businesses are typically looking for Managed IT Support provided by companies who offer support on a local basis and who can provide a guaranteed response time in such circumstances. Businesses searching for Managed IT Support Near Me are typically looking for service providers who can come to their premises quickly in order to resolve IT support issues.
Regular Backup Testing
Backups are not adequate unless you periodically test restoring them (or even better, fully restore from the backup from time to time).
Network Health Checks
Gradual degradation of a network can have a massive impact on a business during peak hours. Often switches and routers are at full capacity and a single port becomes saturated causing a bottleneck. By completing regular network health checks, we are able to identify these issues before they become a major problem.
There is more on Managed IT Support Near Me at www.majestecltd.co.uk/managed-it-support.
Preventing a problem is usually far cheaper than solving a problem that has occurred, therefore the cost of prevention is quickly recouped.
FAQs
What is the difference between managed IT and break-fix support?
Break-fix support is paid for after a problem has occurred, whereas managed IT support is an ongoing service, typically for a regular fee, where the provider monitors and maintains your IT systems to prevent problems from occurring in the first place.
What is the 3-2-1 backup rule?
The 3-2-1 backup rule is simple: 3 copies of your data, 2 different types of storage, 1 off-site. So, if one copy gets lost in a failure, theft or fire, the others are likely to be okay.
What is Cyber Essentials?
Cyber Essentials is a certification scheme backed by the UK government that enables organisations to demonstrate that minimum security measures have been implemented, such as firewalls, secure configuration, user access control, malware protection and ensuring software is up to date. It is a requirement for some public sector contracts, but it can be a useful checklist for organisations who do not intend to actually become certified.
What should a managed IT support agreement include?
Agree clear response times for all severities of issue, the support hours, the way issues are logged and reported, and what is included in and excluded from the agreement. It’s also worth asking how often the backups are tested. We outline the potential damage of a cyber attack to a business in this article.