Avoid Eruptions to Your Business with Managed IT Services

Avoid Eruptions to Your Business with Managed IT Services

Not so long ago, the Kilauea volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii blew its top again. In fact, it has been erupting on and off for hundreds of thousands of years. Commencing in 1983, it has been erupting almost continuously, this recent event was a large one in that series. This natural event caused a great deal of havoc including business closings, air flight interruptions, earthquakes, road closures, landscapes permanently altered by lava flow and of course evacuations. Mother Nature cannot be controlled and the residents of the Big Island must deal with the effects of it every day. They must expect the unexpected.

However, business owners and managers CAN control and minimize the unexpected when it comes to their technology infrastructure. When it comes to the theory of plate tectonics, the network of lava and temperature intensity below the surface of a volcano is ever changing. Likewise, a technology network has a lot of moving parts below the surface that need attention, monitoring and maintenance to ensure nothing erupts!

Managed Services grew out of the business need to get out of the “break/fix” pattern of addressing computer and technology issues because organizational reliance on technology and software applications grew dramatically.

That is why organizations today that employ an IT firm like IT Radix do just that. In the IT industry, this type of program is called “Managed Services.” That name can cover a lot of services, but to the client organization it means that it can focus on running its own business without IT interruptions and enjoy world class information technology strategy, guidance, budgeting, network and user support on a competitive and stable budget. Managed Services grew out of the business need to get out of the “break/fix” pattern of addressing computer and technology issues because organizational reliance on technology and software applications grew dramatically. That growth has resulted in a lot of systems that need to be managed for operations to proceed. It is not just email that needs help desk attention these days but a host of other applications: from accounting and other business management software, to data security, to remote user access to company data stored on a local or cloud server and everything in between.

A Managed IT Services firm takes a holistic, business-oriented view of all of this and provides recommendations and puts in place proactive policies and procedures to prevent issues from ever happening. They put in place monitoring systems that are the IT versions of the seismometers and thermal imaging techniques used to monitor volcanic activity. Top notch firms like IT Radix also include the human element to regularly use professional staff to view what is happening behind the scenes in the logs of the computers and servers to give advanced warning of potential issues—just like seismologists take gas samples from below the earth’s surface to get hands-on knowledge of unseen activity.

There are numerous benefits to employing an IT Managed Services firm to do all of this so that you can focus on what you do best. They include: budget certainty, top-notch advice and best practices from a team of experts that are not on your HR payroll and are available to you. Even organizations with established IT staff in place find benefits with such an arrangement as it pulls their internal IT staff out of the daily fire drills of forgotten passwords, deleted files and lost access to shared files or printers.

Avoid the eruptions (and interruptions) and get IT stability with IT Managed Services.

Learn more about IT Radix's management and support plans here.

First published in our September 2018 IT Radix Resource newsletter