Effective IT Should Be Unnoticed

IT infrastructure is the backbone of nearly every business. Reliability, resiliency and security are key to success and productivity. When the system breaks down, it can create massive headaches, frustrate employees and customers, stifle productivity, and cost you money.

Downtime is expensive. ITICs latest Hourly Cost of Downtime report estimates an hour of downtime costs more than $300,000 for 91% of mid-sized and large enterprises. 44% of companies had outages or more than $1 million. While your business may not suffer such high costs, the impact can still be significant.

Yet, when things are running smoothly, CIOs and business leaders may wonder why they are spending money when everything seems to be going just fine.

Why effective IT is often hidden

Effective IT infrastructure and management should be invisible to end users when it’s working correctly. You don’t have to think about the infrastructure that delivers electricity to your home, so you shouldn’t have to think about your internet connection, network or routing working either. You just want the lights to work and to get online to access the services you need.

IT should be a seamless part of your business operations, and the most effective managed IT services will do just that. Here are just a few of the benefits you get from managed IT services.

Proactive and preventative maintenance

Proactive maintenance is crucial to prevent system failures, downtime, and costly repairs. A managed IT service provider can monitor your system 24/7, identifying and addressing issues before they become major problems.

Using monitoring tools and predictive analytics, managed IT providers take proactive steps to reduce the likelihood of breakdowns or bottlenecks, ensuring you get reliable performance. This might include tasks like applying software patches or updating firmware.

A preventative approach keeps an eye on the things that are likely to cause problems and plans for routine maintenance. Think of it in terms of your car. If you fail to change the oil, your car may still run fine for a while. However, if you ignore it long enough, it can damage your engine beyond repair. Instead of paying a small amount for a regular oil change, you are now stuck with an expensive engine replacement and the loss of your vehicle during repair.

Proactive and preventative maintenance ensures your infrastructure runs smoothly and provides several benefits, including:

• Lowering risks of breakdowns and slowdowns
• Reducing unplanned downtime
• Improves asset life cycle
• Minimize expensive, urgent repairs
• Reduces maintenance costs

The proactive and preventative maintenance models of maintenance are preferable to a reactive break/fix model, where you wait for something to break down before fixing it. FYI, the best managed IT services won’t just put a bandage on a fix either. They will fix the problem for good.

Network Monitoring

A proactive IT strategy includes network monitoring to actively scan for potential problems. Recognizing anomalies or abnormal traffic on your network can help to identify potential threats or bottlenecks. In many cases, this allows your managed IT provider to handle problems before you even notice them.

Today’s networks have been incredibly complex. The average enterprise-level company is now managing about 135,000 endpoint devices. While you may have more or less, it’s essential to monitor your network for potential issues before they cause trouble.

At Sagiss, we install an in-house computer on your network, which allows our team to access your network to diagnose and fix potential problems to make sure your network runs efficiently without interrupting your staff.

Network Security

Managed IT services can also include managed security services, providing next-generation anti-virus, network firewall, web content filtering and vulnerability management. This provides another layer of proactive management to prevent unauthorized access and identify and resolve security gaps.

On average, a new cybersecurity attack occurs every 39 seconds with more than 2,200 attacks every day. The Independent IT-Security Institute (AV-TEST) registers 450,000 new malicious programs daily as well. The best security protection may go unnoticed except by the professionals monitoring it by preventing successful attacks.

Network Documentation

Another proactive area where managed IT services can help is by creating a map of your network and endpoints. When diagnosing a failure, this can save hours of work. Network documentation helps to resolve support questions more quickly, improve your network security and speed up any disaster recovery.

This is another area that often goes unnoticed until it becomes critical.

IT Asset Management

IT asset management (ITAM) is a big part of maintaining an efficient IT infrastructure.

At Sagiss, for example, we can create a network roadmap that plots out the next year and make recommendations based on your unique needs. This allows for more effective planning, budgeting, procurement, deployment, and retirement of end-of-life tools, including hardware and software licenses.

ITAM means you’ll know the current and future state of your infrastructure and when it’s time to update, upgrade or migrate to new solutions.

When things go wrong, it’s noticeable. You can’t access your online resources, servers or applications are unavailable, ransomware has encrypted your files. Wouldn’t it be better to prevent those things from happening in the first place?

The best IT support tends to go unnoticed. When things are running smoothly, it’s easy to forget all the work that goes on behind the scenes to keep it working as intended, but that’s how it’s supposed to work. You want to go about your business under optimal conditions without having to worry.

Sagiss offers managed IT services, managed security services and managed cloud services for North Texas businesses. Contact us and let’s discuss your IT management needs.