“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” While this quaint old expression may apply to a process that doesn’t need modifying, it sure doesn’t work for the world of business technology. The smartest time to evaluate your IT system and make any incremental adjustments is before it can break, not after.
There are mainly two approaches to IT maintenance that we see businesses implementing: responsive and preventative. Some companies try to save money on periodic maintenance checks by simply not running those checks at all; instead, they wait for something to go wrong, and then they respond to it.
What’s wrong with this? For one thing, a significant software/hardware/network failure means downtime – downtime that will probably cost your business more in lost productivity than you would have spent on preventative maintenance. Neglected issues may also cause subtle but progressive slowdowns in your IT system’s efficiency. One component’s failure may set off a daisy chain of other, even costlier failures. Last but not least, a security breach could expose you to data loss and/or legal liability.
Preventative maintenance has the opposite goal. Instead of addressing crises that have already landed in your lap, you focus on keeping those crises from occurring. Here are some reasons why your IT system requires a scheduled preventive maintenance:
How much money does your business make each hour that it is supposed to operate, but can’t? Every hour that your IT infrastructure system doesn’t function costs your business money. When you take time to care for your network systems and check over all hardware and software regularly, you find that the time required to do those ‘checkups’ is considerably less than if you worked a system to the failure point. Also, it is far less expensive to mitigate the possible IT issues before they become larger, costlier problems that take longer to fix and cause more disruptions.
Computer equipment can often be an expensive investment for small and medium businesses. However, the better you care for your equipment, the longer it will last. Preventative maintenance prolongs the life of your equipment so you can get more hours out of it. The reduced hardware cost can hence provide you an increased profit.
As technology grows, so do opportunities for havoc when it comes to the most fragile and valuable component of your network – its data. Imagine what would happen if critical data became corrupted, stolen, lost, or otherwise compromised. For most businesses, that could not only expose them to financial consequences, but could also have legal compliance repercussions. Preventative maintenance includes testing your backups on a scheduled basis to make ensure your data is being backed up, secure, and duplicated onsite and offsite for maximum protection. It can also help maintain your systems so security vulnerabilities are identified as they occur – not as they are exploited.
Keeping up to date also means that things like your firewalls and other security protocols are keeping out potential dangers to your company. These dangers include hackers, viruses and ransomware to name a few. Spending the time to keep all of your software up to date means that you are investing in the safety and reliability of your systems and your company – which in the end is a bonus for you. By taking the regular time to do updates, patches and tests, you can ensure that your software is not only kept up-to-date, but also that it is working at maximum efficiency.
Bottom Line: How your infrastructure operations may be at risk due to unseen-but-present points of failure, or weak spots in the process. Preventative maintenance can identify weak links in your IT infrastructure and review them before they have a chance to break, causing damage to the rest of your system.
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