IT Support East London
DELIVERING IT SERVICES AND SOLUTIONS IN LONDON AND THE UK, TAILORED TO YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS
Unlock Your IT Power
DELIVERING IT SERVICES AND SOLUTIONS IN LONDON AND THE UK, TAILORED TO YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS
Unlock Your IT Power
Doing Away with the Break/Fix Model: How Proactive IT Support Can Help Your East London Business
As organisations embrace technology for various processes and benefits, there is a push for IT teams to address issues before they become catastrophic problems. Implementing this more strategic approach entails adopting proactive IT practices for managing workloads and IT infrastructure.
Even with many organisations realising this, many others still use a break/fix model. This is a reactive approach where the organisation contacts an IT team or professional to fix an issue after it has occurred.
While some professionals might be able to fix the issue quickly, that does not eliminate the risk of downtime, loss of productivity, customer dissatisfaction and loss of revenue. Additionally, a reactive approach can lead to employee burnout if they will regularly be under pressure to fix issues in the least amount of time.
Fortunately, businesses can partner with companies that provide proactive IT support East London services to avoid the issues associated with reactive IT support. In this article, we will help you understand proactive IT support and how an IT support East London team can help.
It is a strategic approach that focuses on identifying and tackling possible IT issues before they become crippling problems. Many IT issues can go unreported if you have a reactive approach, which happens if IT professionals are too busy to notice or do not know what to look out for to know when something is going wrong.
A proactive IT support system entails ensuring your IT infrastructure is as robust as possible. After that, the business has to work with an IT support East London team to implement audits, performance monitoring and maintenance to ensure your infrastructure is always running as expected.
These add-on services will also ensure you know whether any potential issues are coming up that need to be addressed promptly.
Identifying and acting upon IT issues before their appearance has several benefits, as shown below.
Downtime is very expensive, and the cost depends on the size of the business. The costs associated with downtime have to do with customers being unable to do business with you, lost productivity, and both software and hardware replacement expenses if they are responsible for the downtime.
It can also cost you extra if you have to bring in IT professionals to sort out the issues under pressure because you know your business is losing money every second that your IT infrastructure is down.
Having an IT support East London team providing proactive IT services reduces the potential for downtime, thereby reducing the financial risks associated with something going wrong with your infrastructure.
Businesses must ensure that all mission-critical software and hardware are working as expected for everyone. There has to be consistency. By constantly monitoring devices, apps, networks, and systems in your infrastructure, IT professionals can understand how your infrastructure is supposed to work and how it typically does. By having this knowledge, they can easily identify if any part of it starts drifting off, providing an inconsistent experience for everyone across the network.
Many factors impact how employees feel about their work. One of these is the resources they have available to do their jobs. If these resources are unavailable for any reason, they ruin the employees’ experience. A poor employee experience can cause dissatisfaction and boredom, ultimately leading to loss of interest and productivity. There is no stating how devastating loss of productivity can be for a business, especially in a fast-paced or service industry where clients expect results quickly and for teams to meet deadlines in time.
Employees might also have a poor experience if they are regularly taken away from their work and asked to urgently fix issues that should be handled by a dedicated team of IT professionals. Ensuring the systems that they use and rely on are always available, and the employees do not have to fix them, can improve morale and employee satisfaction. The result is improved productivity and other benefits for the business.
Businesses can lose data in several ways. Different types of cybersecurity threats are one of the most common reasons for business data loss. These threats can present in various ways, including malware, viruses, and network intrusion.
Data loss can have a cascading effect across a business. The reason is that it has to work to get its data back and then deal with the reputational damage associated with people knowing it lost important user and customer details through a cybersecurity attack.
Businesses can lose data due to hardware and software failure. If one or multiple drives in a server fail, there is a chance the business will lose data if it did not take precautions to prevent drive failure from causing partial or complete data loss. Software can also cause data loss, which can happen if it is closed improperly or misconfigured in some way.
Other causes of data loss include natural disasters, human error, liquid damage, power outages and insiders.
A proactive IT support East London team can help protect you and your business against data loss caused by these and other factors. One of the ways they can do this is by actively monitoring your infrastructure so they can note intrusions before they happen. They can also monitor your hardware and software so they can take care of anything likely to come up before it does.
The other is backing up your data in off-site locations so you always have a “clean” copy in case of a cyberattack like a ransomware attack. These off-site backups are also incredibly helpful for restoring your data in case of complete data loss due to natural disasters and complete hardware or software failure.
If you do not want to manage your infrastructure, IT support service providers can also set you up with cloud infrastructure that provides you with all the hardware, software, and services you need. The benefit here is that you do not have to own or maintain the server, which can save the business some money depending on its server demands.
Any business relying on outdated appliances, devices, processes, or infrastructure is at a huge disadvantage. Today’s businesses rely on their IT infrastructure to enable remote work, enable collaboration among teams, manage user data, and leverage data analytics, machine learning and AI for various purposes.
Even with these use cases, businesses must remain vigilant of technological changes that could give them a competitive edge. Unless you are an IT professional or have a lot of interest in technology, it is almost impossible to know what advancements could help or hurt your business.
A proactive IT support team can help you see the bigger picture and understand the present and future technological landscape so you can stay informed and ahead of everyone else.
Technology and IT infrastructure are usually beneficial if the people who use them know how to take full advantage of them. A proactive IT support team can identify knowledge gaps among your employees and provide the necessary training to get them up to speed. Training on issues like cybersecurity and preventing cyberattacks, where humans are often the weakest links, will benefit your business massively.
Even with all the benefits that businesses stand to get from proactive IT support, they still encounter some challenges. The first is resistance to change, which presents itself in two ways. First, some professionals may feel like the IT support team is replacing them, so they resist that happening. The second is employees being so invested in specific tools, workflows, and processes that they are not open to new ways of doing and handling things.
Educating employees on why there is a new way of doing this can make integrating proactive IT support and processes easier.
The second is investment costs. Businesses may be required to invest in new technologies and tools. The good news is that those that provide proactive IT support almost always provide managed IT services. This means the business doesn’t have to invest in anything else other than in the business and team that will be handling its IT services.
The last challenge is access to data. Many business owners want to be privy to all the data collected about their systems using active monitoring and analytics tools. They also want to know how the IT team is handling this data.
In this modern era, monitoring and other tools IT support teams use to keep your infrastructure safe make their data available to all parties with access, which means this challenge can be overcome easily.
The break/fix approach that businesses have used in the past and that some businesses continue to use has numerous disadvantages that will hurt your business. Instead of this approach, they should switch to a proactive IT support model where issues are identified and rectified before becoming problematic.