There’s an old saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In the IT world, this is proven to be true every day as companies spend significant amount of money and time digging out from outages, data losses and other problems that could easily have been avoided with proper planning.
Welcome to the world of Monitoring, which allows forward thinking organizations to prevent serious problems by knowing about potentially catastrophic situations before they affect productivity and profitability. Back in the old days (less than a decade ago!) Monitoring was a fairly rudimentary activity that involved administrators sitting at a desk top computer running scans to identify potential problems. Needless to say, this was not a particularly effective strategy, and in many cases the only became aware of problems when they were reported by employees in the throes of a full-fledged panic.
In 2014, there’s simply no excuse for this approach. Organizations in every industry need to take a proactive approach to Monitoring not only their software, but also the performance of their servers and other hardware. And they need to do it every second of every day – there are no weekends off anymore. So what makes a good monitoring strategy?
For starters, systems need to have built-in alerts to let IT professionals know about potential issues, such as a server overheating, a power outage in an office, or malicious hacking. And all alerts need to be delivered via text, message or email so that IT teams can be aware of issues as early as possible. It’s also important to have dashboards so that technologists can easily see how well their systems are working. The crisis-response model is based on reacting to problems; a more proactive approach involves red- flagging glitches and other issues before they blow up.
To give you a sense of how important all this is, Zobrio gives Monitoring away for free to all our IT and Managed Services clients. We don’t do it because it’s convenient for us or as some marketing tool – we do it because it’s an absolute necessity these days. We can’t complete our mission as an IT Support firm without knowing where your vulnerabilities are and giving Monitoring away is the only way to ensure quality service. Free monitoring is, of course, an attractive feature for businesses so if you are interested we’d love to walk you through our IT Support packages.
To request more information on our free monitoring IT and Managed Services, drop us a line here.