What is Proactive Maintenance?
Proactive maintenance, also known as proactive IT services, simply means taking care of your managed IT equipment. It is the prevention of computer problems by allowing you to schedule preventative measures before any failures or issues occur. This prevents most outages and minimizes downtime due to problems with it services.
Operations are managed through Preventative Maintenance Agreements (PMAs) which are managed by managed it service providers. PMAs allow for scheduled maintenance for managed it services clients that allows you to identify potential IT problems before they cause major disruptions or downtime. A PMA can be used in both managed data centers as well as managed hosted environments where managed hosting providers manage everything from the, software up-time monitoring, managed backups, managed server monitoring, managed security system, managed firewalls and managed operating systems.
A proactive maintenance plan includes managed services which are managed by managed it service providers to diagnose your managed data center equipment through managed inspections. Preventative inspections are part of a proactive maintenance plan that allows the managed hosting provider to look at all managed it equipment including routers, switches, servers and storage devices. You must understand that even an experienced IT or managed hosting provider cannot predict when hardware will fail but having certain tools installed on the managed it services clients equipment can help with early fault detection. These tools will be able to monitor critical components continually for potential failures which is what proactive maintenance helps prevent.
How Proactive Maintenance Helps?
Proactive maintenance helps improve managed it services by preventing emergencies. A proactive approach to managed it services helps organizations save time and money on unplanned outages which can cost up to $100,000 per hour. Having managed inspections performed through managed inspections provides insight into potential failures before they happen which allows your managed hosting provider to deploy patches or software upgrades that prevent problems from occurring during the early stages of the life cycle of managed it equipment.
What are some benefits of Proactive Maintenance?
Some immediate benefits for companies who use proactive maintenance for managed data centers include reduced risk of service disruptions, reduced damage or loss of sensitive data, reduced costs associated with hardware replacement and fewer security breaches due to areas where vulnerabilities might exist in systems configurations. Short-term benefits would be the increase in productivity and decrease in operational costs. Long term benefits include improved company reputation, lower risk of legal action, increased customer satisfaction and the ability to provide high levels of managed it services to customers.
Proactive maintenance allows for your managed hosting provider to build a proactive managed data center maintenance plan that fits your specific needs. A proactive managed data center maintenance plan will save you time and money by providing insight into potential failures before they happen which will save you from unplanned outages caused by managed it service disruptions.
Proactive IT Services is a managed service that deals with the preventative maintenance actions and procedures that should be taken in order to keep your commercial business up and running efficiently. However, what exactly does proactive IT services encompass?
Here are the 4 main proactive maintenance areas we look after:
– Patch Management – whether your managed service provider provides this for you or you do it yourself, patch management is critical because if vulnerabilities in software go unpatched, they can easily be exploited by malicious individuals with bad intentions.
– Security Updates – many updates require a reboot of a computer in order to take effect, so when managed it services conducts regular security audits of all their clients’ machines, any computers found without the latest critical security updates installed will be shut down until security is dealt with; this ensures critical updates are received by your network and computer systems.
– Data Backup – managed it services should include data backup processes in their service, especially for companies who cannot afford to lose any data or who don’t have an offsite disaster recovery plan to ensure that even if your entire office building is leveled, all your company’s data will still be secure.
– Disaster Recovery & Contingency Plans – managed it services provide you with a way of recovering after a disaster has struck. Instead of trying to resurrect the dead computer system on your own, managed it services will come in and get everything back up and running so business can resume as usual – minus the headaches!
If you want managed it services to keep your business computing systems up and running at optimal performance, then managed it services are the way forward.