When it comes to modern software and cloud-based hardware deployments, 24 x 7 x 365 proactive monitoring of network infrastructure  accompanies hosting, maintenance and support in order to create peace of mind and reduce stress and dissonance in business owners’ lives.

Introducing the Theme: Chaos and Dissonance

It is late at night, and your phone lights up. Your website just received emails from multiple people complaining that their accounts are inaccessible. 30 minutes later, your entire IT team has been called into the office to manage the software. After 3 hours, the sun comes up, and you start crafting emails to your customers explaining how a key server went down without proper back-up. Everything they had created on your site over the last 2 weeks since your last backup is lost.

Variations on a Theme

Variations of this nightmare scenario have been experienced by businesses of many shapes and sizes, where key network infrastructure is not properly backed up, does not have great redundancy, and the data loss is catastrophic. Whether data loss from storage or just a site going down for hours, days or weeks, many businesses will be catastrophically impacted by the effects of major infrastructure problems.

When you add the problems caused by growing beyond your infrastructure, network infrastructure significantly impacts your labor and capital bottom line. For many businesses with customers and employees in multiple areas, there is significant risk to the business from local events like earthquakes and fires which do not impact the rest of your target market. For local businesses, your customers and employees can understand data loss during shared catastrophe, but with global customers and multiple employee locations through telecommuting, you cannot afford to lose your computer services, even for an understandable catastrophe.

Resolutions of the Theme

In order to maintain and grow your business without the fear of catastrophic data loss, 24x7x365 Network support and management is necessary. For managed assurance, your network support team must be able to deliver service which prevents the same problems that keep you up at night. Look for the following standards to ensure that your proactive monitoring is secure and efficient:

• Multiple Data-Center Backups – If someone is providing you business recovery, they have to have better infrastructure than you can provide in your office. This includes RAID5 servers in multiple locations so that neither hardware, software nor an act of God will cause a permanent or catastrophic data loss.
• Fast Back-Up Recovery – What are your monitoring team’s processes for getting you back up and running in the event your in-house IT goes down? Good systems have automatic processes to switch to the backup hardware in the event your site or online software goes down. This needs to be automatic via a programming call, not manual entry.
• Experience with Multiple Systems – With modern business systems, software, hardware and delivery systems are becoming increasingly more integrated. With cloud-based software deployments, many times a series of servers will run more than one business’s software and hardware products. Your proactive monitoring and support team needs to know the different parts of cloud-based infrastructure and be prepared to manage IT efficiently both remotely and in person.
• Training – Sometimes the best way to learn something is to teach it. If your proactive monitoring team cannot teach your in-house IT and other employees how to manage software, servers and other IT hardware, they have not learned what is necessary to keep you from getting nightmares concerning their IT support.

Do not let your IT keep you up at night. With real-time monitoring, hosting support, managed software plans, training and professional installation, modern IT outsourcing is more effective and cheaper than many business owners have experienced in the past. To learn more about proactive monitoring, hosting and disaster recovery, please contact us.