How unsupervised are your computers? However advanced business IT systems are, they cannot be left to run on their own indefinitely.
Monitoring ensures that your data is flowing correctly and consistently, and that your system is performing properly.
Furthermore, monitoring is changing, becoming more advanced. Increasingly, proactive monitoring is becoming a business essential.
Lee Wrall of Everything Tech talks about the benefits of this development.
Looking After Your Performance
“If you don’t have proper monitoring in place, then what might begin as a minor problem can escalate into a major system failure. It’s therefore a form of performance monitoring.”
In a wider business context, knowing how you are performing is essential in gauging your success and staying ahead of the competition
“The same is true of your IT infrastructure. Monitoring can apply to your networks, your applications, security and data. It gives a window onto the health and status of your IT setup and services.”
If, for example, you have a data centre hosting your infrastructure, it is essentially what is powering your business. Therefore, it makes sense to ensure that it is working consistently, efficiently and to the top of its capabilities.
“This is about active management, to identify real and potential problems and deal with them before they can cause disruption.”
Combating Downtime
Just as an effective IT infrastructure can boost a company’s profitability, productivity and reputation, so downtime can be seriously detrimental.
“An IT outage is not just an inconvenience. It can have serious financial and reputational implications. A British Airways outage in 2017 took down its communications and wiped over £170 million off its market value.”
IT services must be resilient, which means constantly monitoring your applications, data availability and website.
“Just something as basic as a page not found error when people are searching for your site can lose you customers.”
The Benefits of Proactive Monitoring
Risk does not rest, therefore neither should the measures that can protect IT infrastructure against it.
“Proactive monitoring means ensuring your systems are running 24-7. It allows for performance measurement and benchmarking, but at the same time it anticipates issues and allows for evasive and protective planning.”
The key areas proactive monitoring covers are:
- Network
- Security
- Data centres
- Applications
For networks, proactive monitoring will flag up any protocol issues, or other things that might cause congestion or other problems. It also provides planning opportunities for upgrades and other strategic improvements.
In security terms, monitoring means maintaining operational integrity.
“It is vital for businesses and organisations to safeguard their equipment and data assets. Simply reacting to security breaches can mean leaving it too late so having the means to anticipate threats is vital”
Application issues can affect productivity. Proactive monitoring gives IT support the means to study performance and address issues before they can have an impact on the workflow of employees either directly or indirectly dependent on applications.
For data centres, it is vital that IT support has visibility of the health status of servers, storage and network equipment. It is critical that CPUs, memory and input and output are all working efficiently.
“In an age where so many businesses are data-critical, and digitally dependent, having proactive IT support is fast becoming a necessity,” concludes Lee.
If you have any concerns about the integrity of your systems and want to put the right measures in place to protect your assets, and their future, please call Everything Tech on 0161 826 2220 or visit everythingtech.co.uk.
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