Your IT network is much like a car in that it requires regular maintenance to operate. And as with a car, when IT breaks down due to lack of maintenance, not even an expert may be able to fix it immediately. Instead, you must sit through frustrating downtime and watch your productivity decline until the problem gets fixed. This is why it’s vital to stop these breakdowns before they occur, and managed IT services are a way to accomplish this easily and effectively.
Take a look at why proactive IT maintenance is key to your business’s success, and how a managed IT services provider (MSP) can help you in this area.
How does proactive maintenance prevent IT emergencies?
Proactive maintenance, as the name suggests, takes place before any problems arise, preventing the damage they cause entirely. This concept is different from reactive maintenance in that it addresses the root causes of problems to stop them from occurring or becoming more serious, as opposed to just implementing stopgap solutions. So instead of waiting for problems or signs of wear and tear to act, with proactive maintenance, MSPs set a schedule and regularly seek out errors, inefficiencies, and incompatibilities, then address them before they become major issues.
What are the benefits of managed IT services?
The proactive approach of MSPs has a wide variety of benefits that affect all aspects of your technology infrastructure, including:
- Minimizing disruptions: This is likely the biggest benefit, as tech downtime reduces productivity and customer satisfaction while increasing the stress of your workforce. Proactive maintenance addresses the underlying issues of downtime events to minimize their frequency and duration.
- Improving user/customer experience: By keeping everything up to date and ensuring systems stay responsive, proactive IT maintenance enhances the satisfaction of all involved stakeholders.
- Collecting actionable data: During proactive maintenance, your IT team goes through all of your systems to check their performance and possible problems. While they’re doing this, they can also harvest valuable data about the performance and usage of your technology, empowering your leadership to make more informed strategic decisions.
- Strengthening your cybersecurity posture: Proactive maintenance includes a review of your cybersecurity tools and policies to ensure they are fully updated and able to defend against the latest cybersecurity threats.
- Maintaining compliance requirements: Data security and other compliance regulations change frequently, so your systems must keep up to avoid penalties. Proactive maintenance keeps you in line with current regulations and can prepare your IT for future changes.
- Extending device life span: While proactive IT maintenance does focus a lot on software, it does not ignore your hardware. Cleaning, parts replacement, and diagnostics ensure you enjoy peak performance of your devices for longer and pay less for fixes and replacements.
Leverage MSPs for more efficient and convenient IT maintenance
Admittedly, few people get excited at the prospect of performing IT maintenance, including your own IT internal department, especially as there are many other things they could be doing that are less boring and more beneficial to the company. Hiring a MSP to perform proactive maintenance on your business technology infrastructure relieves your internal IT of this burden while still ensuring vital work gets done.
MSPs are specially geared toward proactive IT maintenance. As it’s one of their main functions, they have the trained staff and equipment to do it quickly and effectively. You might perform maintenance on your systems once or twice a year, but an MSP can do it every day, so they are much better positioned to ensure you get the maximum benefits of proactive IT maintenance.
With an MSP’s knowledge and expertise at your disposal, you get optimized IT performance and actionable reports on your tech, all without losing focus on your primary business operations. Learn more about MSPs and how they can benefit your organization by contacting outsourceIT.
