Maintaining your IT infrastructure is essential in today’s fast-paced and digital world. Proactive monitoring has become critical for all companies.
What is proactive monitoring?
Proactive monitoring is when you actively and continuously monitor IT systems. The reason is to spot and identify any issues early on to prevent them from turning into bigger, more costly problems. It involves using various monitoring tools and technologies to collect real-time data, analyse performance metrics and identify any vulnerabilities in the network. By doing so, businesses can take preventative actions to keep their IT infrastructure working effectively and to minimise downtime.
Are you considering outsourcing your IT and proactive monitoring of your IT network? The cost may be putting you off. This blog will take a look at the reason why it could cost you more to not implement proactive monitoring.
If you’re searching for IT support companies in Bristol, come to Cloud and More. We offer proactive monitoring and management of your IT systems. We can talk you through how we can help improve your operations, enhance your cybersecurity and ensure the smooth functioning of your business. If you’re looking for IT support in Bristol, get in touch with us today.
What are the benefits of proactive monitoring?
Early detection prevents costly repairs
Proactive monitoring enables you to detect and address any IT issues before they escalate into major problems. Identifying problems early on allows IT teams to take immediate action. If the issue is left longer, it may turn into a much more expensive repair. IT requires upgrades and maintenance otherwise it can fail. These IT failures take time to remedy and can be expensive. When you outsource your proactive monitoring to a professional IT company, they can ensure that your systems are always upgraded with the latest software. Outdated and inadequate equipment can be replaced before productivity suffers. By avoiding expensive breakdowns, proactive monitoring can result in substantial cost savings.
Boosts productivity
Proactive monitoring will spot troublesome issues in your system and sort them out before it affects your downstream processes. When problems escalate and turn into bigger issues, it can cause your systems to go down for a long time. This will stop your business from operating and your employees will be unable to work. These types of frequent interruptions or a slow system will affect your employees’ performance and productivity.
Offers recommendations to help improve your operations
A proactive IT provider can provide suggestions and recommendations to help. As part of the monitoring process, the monitoring tools can collect data and analyse the different aspects of your IT infrastructure including performance metrics, resource usage and system behaviours. It can provide valuable insights and recommendations that will help you to optimise your operations.
Ensures your system is reliable
Your IT infrastructure is essential for your daily business operations. There are times when your system is overloaded due to increased activity. Proactive monitoring will highlight when demand increases and ensure that the IT infrastructure can cope with it. It can provide enough bandwidth to accommodate traffic and prevent any lags during those busy periods.
Improves cybersecurity
Cyber threats are a constant risk and are ever-evolving. With proactive monitoring, you can update your security and implement updates to the software. By continuously monitoring your IT you can detect and respond to security breaches in real time, minimising any threats. Proactive monitoring utilises the latest security strategies and top-of-the-range technology. Malware can conceal itself on your system for a long time before it causes damage. Proactive monitoring can either completely prevent the damage of the malware or at least, lessen its impact.
Time to respond
With proactive monitoring, your IT team or IT company will have time to work on a fix for any issue that arises. They can then prevent it from spreading and impacting the whole network. If you’re only reacting to the problem when it’s done the damage already, it can take longer to fix, potentially putting your company at a standstill until the issue is sorted.
Real-life examples
Let’s take a real-life example – A small business that relies heavily on their email system to communicate with their clients and suppliers notice one day that their email server is running slowly and briefly dropping out. The company ignore it as it’s only a minor issue that’s not really affecting them. As time goes on, the email disruptions cause delays in emails going out to stakeholders, leading to miscommunication and missed business opportunities. This is now hugely affecting the company’s reputation. The issue continues to persist and the email server is on the verge of complete failure. The business is now forced to seek emergency IT support to fix the problem. The result is downtime and the cost of an urgent IT repair. The company misses sales opportunities and suffers from decreased productivity. If the company had implemented proactive monitoring, it would have highlighted the issue with the email server early on and been resolved quicker. The prolonged downtime, reputational damage and cost of the emergency IT intervention could have been prevented.
Another real-world scenario may be that the IT system fails late Friday night. You may not notice this until Monday morning and have little time to resolve it before your staff come into work. Had the company had a proactive monitoring service, the failure would have been immediately flagged up and your IT partner could have solved the issue over the weekend, before Monday morning.
Proactive monitoring is under-appreciated as it sits in the background finding and eliminating issues before you even notice. It isn’t until you take it away that you realise just how crucial it is. Critical equipment problems rarely happen in an instant. They tend to display warning signs first. These signs left unchecked can become a crisis.
If you’re on the hunt for IT support companies in Bristol, Cloud and More can assist. With our proactive monitoring services, we can detect and address potential issues before they escalate. We will minimise your downtime and maximise your productivity. Contact us today to schedule a consultation and discover how Cloud and More can optimise your IT infrastructure for success. Come to us for all your IT support in Bristol and beyond.