One thing every business has in common is that they just want their IT systems to work; everyday, continually. No outages, no viruses sneaking in, no equipment failures. In fact, they want everything to work so well that they don’t even have to think about it. Small business owners often ignore the need for a proactive approach to IT maintenance because they think it costs too much. So, they wait until something breaks and then they call us.
The problem with this approach is when you wait until something breaks, not only is there a sudden service cost which depending on the severity of the issue could be expensive, but there are the hidden costs of downtime which erodes the profitability of the business. We see this profit erosion again and again with break/fix customers. Wages spent for staff that cannot work productively when systems fail, thousands in lost production revenue from computer-controlled machines that have crashed, or clients that must be cancelled. Then there’s the cost of extensive data reconstruction/recovery in the case of failed, corrupt or inadequate backups or virus infections.
Reactive IT solutions always end up costing our customers more in the long term. For a few years now, have been trying to advance more of our small business market toward proactive solutions, where we do more on the front end, managing, monitoring and repairing servers and workstations remotely before systems reach the failure point. Remote monitoring, maintenance (RMM) software is the key to implementing this continuity insurance in your IT environment. In essence, we stopped selling them service calls and started selling them on systems continuity for their business.
One of the most important features of this RMM service plan is Managed Backup. Managed Backup takes your staff out of the equation and provides superior data protection and recovery. No more missed backups because no one changed the tape/rdx/external drive or failed restores because the backup data was never verified. Files can be backed up as frequently as in 15-minute intervals if desired and software is monitored to ensure it is always working…and if it’s not we will be immediately notified. Data can be recovered from with rapid restoration capability, one file or a full restore and it’s equally as effective in both virtual server environments and physical ones.
Thanks to centralized management and monitoring solutions, small business owners can rest assured that their business data is safe and being handled by experts. Proactive RMM service plans mitigate their risk of downtime and data loss. Fees are usually structured as a monthly amount that spready the cost of the IT budget over the year. Finally, detailed reporting is provided to keep the owner informed.
Consider the risks of not having a proactive fully managed service plan in place which truly safeguards your business data in the case of an equipment failure. Need continuity and peace of mind in your small business? Contact Shaw Computer Systems today to discuss a Managed Service plan that meets your needs.
