What Your MSP is Doing When You Don't Call Them
When deciding on the IT support service for your business, there are two types of IT service you can choose. There are help desk break-fix services that solve problems when you call and there are Managed Service Providers (MSPs) who provide ongoing IT support on and off the phone. Managed IT services tend to be more involved and will take greater responsibility not just for your problems in the moment, but for the general health and security of your entire business network.
With a standard break-fix service, an IT team does nothing for your business unless you call them. And that call starts the clock ticking to solve a 'ticket' after which, you're back on your own. But not so with an MSP. What are managed IT service teams doing in their office when you don't call them? We can promise we're not just twiddling our thumbs or sipping sodas with our feet kicked up. Here's what we're really up to:
Monitoring Your Network for Suspicious Activity
One of the key aspects that defines 'managed' IT services is network monitoring. Network monitoring gives a trained technician detailed information about every single thing your network is doing from warming up hard drives to moving data packets and everything in between. A business with managed IT can be sure that network monitoring is keeping an eye on the servers and network activity and will red-flag anything that seems out of place.
A service IT technician will then take a closer look at anything that is flagged. Through this method, IT can stop hackers, keep track of business trippers, and manage large data transfers from an over-watch position over your entire network. Keeping everything ship-shape.
Researching the Best Business Software for Your Next Upgrade
The software you use for your business determines how efficient and cutting-edge your business processes can be. From manufacturing to customer service, your choice of business software matters and your managed IT service team can help. Rather than waiting for you to ask for an upgrade, we are constantly on the lookout for the best business software in the industry and will make a recommendation if there's ever a configuration that would work better for and integrate smoothly with your business
Keeping Up with Security Software Updates
Software upgrades are an important part of any business tech infrastructure, especially security patches. The software you use is constantly being improved by the developers, often to close security gaps that have been revealed by very recent industry hacker attacks. But these patch updates don't always come in automatically and can risk your files if implemented sloppily.
Your managed IT team is constantly on the lookout for new security patches and software updates that will increase the safety and functionality of your current business software. They also prepare update plans to that there is little risk of file corruption (and a quick recovery available) when performing the updates.
Balancing Your Server Load
Your website servers and file servers hand a lot of data, and increased traffic or work activity can put a strain on the servers you use for everyday functions. Fortunately, a managed IT team can help you make sure that performance stays at its peak even during the busiest and most demanding times for your servers. We do this through something called load balancing, where a cluster of servers shares out the weight of a single high-impact task or a great deal of online traffic all at once. Managed IT services can help you prevent downtime by spreading out the server load to as many virtual servers are necessary for the task.
Curating Backups for Your Recovery Plan
Your backup recovery plan inevitably involves taking regular backups and storing the most recent ones as an emergency 'save point' for your entire business. However, these backups don't take care of themselves. They must be extracted, compressed, and carefully stored so that you can be sure there are real working backups in case of an emergency. Your managed IT team will make certain that each backup is taken with professional care, is not corrupted or incomplete, and is ready for a full implementation of your restoration process.
Waiting for the Phone to Ring
And, of course, we're always waiting for the phone to ring, a message to come in, or an email to fall into our inboxes letting us know that a client needs direct friendly help with a problem. For more on how a managed IT service can help your business both on and off the phone, contact us today!