Why a Business
needs an IT Maintenance Solution
Networks, just like an automobile needs to be maintained in
order to reduce and prevent unnecessary failures. Properly applied maintenance programs
can protect against external threats as well as internal failures.
When the “nimda” worm was first discovered back
in the fall of 2001, Microsoft had already released the patch that protected
against that vulnerability almost a year before (331 days). So
network administrators had plenty of time to apply the update. Of course, many
still hadn’t done so, and the “nimda” worm caused lots of
damage. Today no one has this much
time anymore. Virus
are spreading rapidly in a much shorter timeframe.
Just take a look
at some of the disasters that happened to other small businesses right here in
our area who were NOT performing ongoing maintenance on their computer
networks.
This school had not
been applying security patches and upgrading their virus protection programs on
a timely basis. A new virus was
released and quickly spread from one PC to their entire network. The network had to be shut down in order
not to re-infect cleansed PCs.
Every PC in the network had to be individually touched, cleansed, and
updated with a current version of the virus protection footprints and patches
applied on the operating system.
This caused their
entire network to be down for more than 3 full days and cost them over $4,000
in out of pocket support fees to get them back up and running. Naturally, the costs were much higher
when you factor in the lost productivity of their employees during that time
and lack of usefulness of their network during class time.
Hardware failure costs a Small
Manufacturing Firm
over $20,000 and over 4 days of downtime.
One afternoon, a
critical server began to show signs of failure. After running diagnostic tests on the
hardware, it was determined that the disk system was failing. When the equipment was replaced with a
new hardware, it was discovered that the production data on the hard drives had
been corrupted by the failure.
When trying to
recover the data from the back up tapes, it was found that back ups had not
been running successfully, and the files were not available on the tape. The data was sent out to a recovery
specialist, which cost over $20,000.
Even with these efforts, not all the data was restored.
Instead they had to
go back to paper records, and try to recreate the data from there. In the end they were without their
network for over 4 days while the recovery was being attempted. Needless to say, they not only had a
very large expense for recovery services, but had additional support costs as
well as lost multiple days of business productivity and reentry costs.
SPI’s Proactive Performance Program was designed to
eliminate these mistakes by automating and tracking the maintenance process,
monitoring the activities for success or failure standard processes, and taking
steps to correct the problems before they end up being a catastrophe.