Early in my career, a company I was working for caught on fire. Well, not the whole business. Let me explain.
I was only a week into my new position. It was a brisk spring morning, but instead of stopping to smell the roses, I smelled smoke as I was walking into the building. I turned to my friend and saw the look of confusion and disgust on her face. The building definitely smelled of smoke. It happened to be one small faulty wire sparking in the attic of the older building that caused us to shut down for half the day. No electricity was to be ran, which means, no phones being answered for customer service, no computers for inputting customer data into, no orders being placed, nothing. For half of a day, all employees sat around and waited for the green light to do some work, because our lives and work have become so intertwined with technology we cannot function for a half of a work day without it.
Sure, some of us were able to grab our laptops and work remotely from a local coffee shop and our employer was a big believer in storing data in the cloud; but, not every one had the right gear with them to be productive. That half day turned into money loss for my employer and you can probably guess how attractive that looks for your customers and prospects when something like this happens. But it does happen, and if you don’t plan for it and put precautionary steps into place, a small wire can be a big deal.
The reason behind this story is to tie in the final piece in this series on Managed IT Services. Minimized downtime is a promise you should hear from a provider, along with proactive IT management, quarterly business reviews, guaranteed technology refreshment, and 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year security monitoring. Like with the faulty wire, when you don’t have a strong plan in place with a dedicated team checking to ensure your systems are going strong with no issues reported, you take a chance. Those chances can cost you.
You may have the greatest IT staff to fix issues that spring up, but do you have the manpower to pull away from imperative projects to get those items fixed? Sometimes the fix means a costly new server, permanently lost customer files, or stolen personal information to name, but a few, disasters. Minimizing downtime means you won’t have lost revenue, unproductive employees, faulty hardware/software, or reputation damage control. A good Managed IT Service provider minimizes your downtime so you don’t have to stress about your employees spending a half day wondering what to do, your customer’s aren’t becoming annoyed about not reaching you, and you’re not spending money on unplanned expenses to fix disaster recovery.
