Downtime is a productivity and cost killer. Even worse, it can erode service quality and impact how customers perceive your company. In this post, we’ll review a few ways proactive managed IT services can help avert these scenarios with dependable uptime.
There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to catch up on a busy workload only to have the network go down. Downtime is disruptive and kills the productivity of employees. It’s also very expensive for the average business.
According to a recent survey, 545 hours of staff productivity is lost annually due to IT downtime
Today, the “always on” business model is becoming an industry norm. As organizations grow into geographically diverse regions and operations are taken on the road, delivering “always on” functionality is a must. Customers expect it, employees need it.
To ensure business longevity and success, organizations need to focus on making uptime dependable. It not only saves money, but creates returning customer trust and competitive advantages in the market. That being said, downtime is still inevitable. Which is why organizations must have a way to minimize the amount of downtime they experience. And there’s really only one way to do this – by incorporating proactive management into their IT.
Proactive Managed IT Solutions that Help Achieve Uptime Goals
Proactively managed solutions decrease time to detection and issue remediation time by delivering real-time visibility, tracking and alerting. They help eliminate the unknown from the network – whether it be a threat, faulty device or software issue. They can also help secure your organization from cyber threats, data breaches and disasters.
Here are some of the best proactive managed IT solutions for making uptime dependable:
Monitoring and Management
With this solution, a third-party vendor will install agents on the devices (servers, routers, firewalls, switches, etc.) that you want proactively monitored in real-time for health and performance issues. The agent will correlate data and alert an Operations Center when an issue is detected. Engineers can then troubleshoot and fix the problem before it becomes a downtime situation. Monitoring and management help you eliminate downtime and the associated costs, and increase system reliability and performance.
Data Backup and Disaster Recovery
Natural disasters, hard drive crashes, servers going down and data breaches. All can happen without warning and lead to serious downtime. Data Backup and Disaster Recovery safeguards critical data, applications and systems from the kind of loss that can cripple business. Then, off-site disconnected backup allows for seamless recovery with the click of a button in a cloud environment.
Managed Security
Cyber-attacks are taking businesses down left and right, causing long-term downtime and productivity loss. Proactive managed security services can help detect threats that your network is facing and generate actionable plans to help better secure your network. Whether from SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) and vulnerability scans, or patch management and firewall/IPS, organizations can help protect their network uptime with managed security services.
SD-WAN
Traditional networks are struggling to keep up with the increased bandwidth demand from cloud-based applications and systems. And it’s producing more jitter, brownouts and service disruptions. SD-WAN helps organizations meet growing bandwidth-hogging challenges associated with mobility, video, voice and interactive collaboration. It aggregates multiple types of connections – from traditional MPLS to broadband to the latest wireless technologies. Traffic is steered over the best possible connection to ensure consistent, reliable availability.
3 Features Every Proactive Managed IT Solution Needs
These have one big commonality: their goal is to achieve uptime and maintain business operations. Proactive Managed IT Services allow this to happen because of three common features:
24/7/365 Support
Managed IT Services are often delivered from Operations Centers that are 24/7/365. No matter where you are located, what time of day or night, a trained engineer will be available to resolve issues and ensure your business is up and running. The Operations Center becomes an extension of your IT staff, filling expertise gaps, saving time and money, and providing valuable support to achieve your uptime goals.
Issue Awareness
No one wants to walk into work on Monday to find out that the network has been down for the whole weekend without any idea what caused it. One of Managed IT Services greatest characteristics is issue awareness. When you can’t see into your network, discovering the root cause of problems will be very difficult. Visibility is created to achieve greater awareness into what large or small issues are taking place. Proactive maintenance allows IT teams to eliminate small issues before they create downtime situations.
Reliability Guarantee
Proactive Managed IT Services can help organizations gain reliability guarantees. When your systems continue to work seamlessly, employees can be more productive and serve customers more efficiently.
Conclusion
Managed IT Services come in many shapes and sizes – and from many providers that offer solutions that can vary from vendor selection, hours of operation and solution capabilities. It is important to research everything prior to purchase or conduct proof of concept testing to make sure the solution fits with your unique network build.
