3 Ways to Be More Proactive With Your IT

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that IT is more of a cost than a savings mechanism. But in reality, IT is a powerful tool that can help your business eliminate unnecessary expenses, improve operations, and stop problems in their tracks before they even exist. This approach, proactive IT, has many benefits, all of which save you money.

Here are three ways your business can use proactive IT and managed IT services to keep your systems maintained, spend less on technology solutions, discover more opportunities to succeed, and get more work done.

Make Patches and Updates a Priority

Patches and updates are frustrating, but not nearly as frustrating as the consequences of not applying them.

Patches and updates are what halt most new and emerging threats, including the kind that hit small businesses. If you don’t apply these updates, it’s only a matter of time until a threat discovers a vulnerability on your system and exploits it against you. Your business should have a remote monitoring and management tool, build a testing protocol, and schedule a clear maintenance window that ensures fixes are deployed in a timely manner (without disrupting your operations).

We recommend you automate your patching and updates by hiring a managed service provider like Omega Technical Solutions to handle this burden for you.

Implement a Data Backup and Recovery Schedule

Many SMBs consider data backup to be synonymous with disaster recovery, but they are two very different parts of the same survival mechanism: business continuity.

Think what would happen if your main server becomes inoperable; a hardware failure or natural disaster could destroy your infrastructure and cause you to lose all sorts of data. If you lose more than a few hours’ worth, that’s a problem that must be addressed. We always like to mention the 3-2-1 rule for backup and data protection, which includes having 3 copies of your data, 2 on different media types, and 1 copy off-site.

Data backup works best when it’s tested regularly, so ensure that your backups are functional through routine testing. If your backups fail, you will want to know so you can correct the problem before you end up needing it.

Monitor Systems for Hardware Failures

The biggest IT problems can be quite dramatic, but here’s a secret hack to prevent them: look for the signs they exhibit before they escalate and become the business-ending issues we know them to be.

A managed service provider like Omega Technical Solutions can use sophisticated technology to monitor data points on every machine on your infrastructure, looking for all the little signs of problems that might not show themselves on a day-to-day basis. These are symptoms that your average user likely won’t see on their own. If we monitor for these pre-failure indicators, they can be addressed long before they become a serious incident that is a lot harder to address.

In short, proactive IT is about actively monitoring for technology operating outside the normal baseline performance, then taking steps to correct it before it becomes a bigger issue. Once we discover a problem, we can order replacement parts, schedule installations, or migrate data before your business operations are impacted.

Learn more about how your business can stay proactive by calling us at (703) 743-3056 today.