Managed IT and Network Monitoring Services
Welcome back to the second half of our two-part article on what managed IT services can do for your company from the top of your software stack to the bottom of your hardware infrastructure. Rather than relying on break-fix solutions and intermittent infrastructure maintenance, managed services can catch problems before they occur and make sure you’re always up to date on updates. Last time we talked about ensuring your online services are reliable for your customers and dynamically managing your server load during high traffic times. Let’s pick up where we left off at optimization!
3 Optimizing Your Data Structure
You don’t just need network monitoring in times of crisis, it is a 24/7 job of keeping your website and business network healthy and online. One of the best uses of server and network monitoring services is to identify the most and least efficient processes in your company network. With detailed monitoring and metrics analysis, you can discover things like which programs installed on company computers are slowing down the network and which company data procedures are creating unnecessary calls for redundant data. With these small but influential pieces of information, your managed IT team can begin to optimize your software suite and business procedures for the smoothest possible company network.
4 Identifying IT Issues Early
Computers work in predictable ways, iterating the tasks they have been assigned endlessly and without fail, that is until something goes wrong. A network monitoring team can help you keep an eye out for issues that haven’t caused problems yet but will in the future. Often, a computer system will fail in a way that can be caught days, sometimes even months, ahead of time and cut off at the pass. Detailed monitoring will reveal dangerous sequences in which a program has begun using a massive amount of bandwidth or is using up company storage space on an endless log file that will eventually top-out a server’s storage capacity.
Monitoring is a good way to watch the horizon of your data infrastructure. While some issues will be caused too quickly to predict, most computer problems will ramp up for at least several minutes and often much longer before coming to a head and creating a critical error. Dust in computers can slowly increase heat to crashing levels, redundant processes can eat up processing power, and resource expensive processes can lock up an entire server if they get too bloated. All of these issues can be spotted early and resolved before they interrupt business procedures or client services as long as a dedicated IT team is on the ball.
5 Repairs Immediately When You Need Them
Of course, the aspect of managed IT services that most businesses understand best is having a technician ready to step in the moment an unavoidable or truly unforeseen problem occurs. If one of your servers dies without warning or a software update fails and corrupts an entire database, having monitored services means there’s an expert already paying attention and likely aware of the problem the moment it occurs. The troubleshooting and recovery process begins immediately with a dedicated team of technicians so that your IT infrastructure can be fixed, restored, or properly updated and the interruptions to your business kept at an absolute minimum.
Server and network monitoring are an important window into the technical health of your company. Data flows between company computers, servers, network hubs, out to clients, and back again into CRMs. Servers hold that data, processing and storing it as instructed. Your business runs on its tech infrastructure and managed IT and network monitoring service can help you keep that infrastructure optimized, problem-free, and quickly repaired. For more information on finding the right managed IT plan for your business, contact us today!