When it comes to maintaining IT, not all problems are immediate. Some issues develop over time and can grow to become major issues – often more than the immediate issues. Akita’s proactive IT support identifies and tackles these types of problems, eliminating them before they can impact on your business. So how does how does proactive support work?
Below, we’ve outlined what goes into Proactive General Maintenance days to explain how organisations can benefit from them:
The need for proactive support
IT issues are an inevitability. The day to day use of software and machines means that things go wrong. New and evolving viruses and malware can also cause systems to go down.
There are also administrative IT tasks – such as patching, updates and disk cleaning – that can be as disruptive as an actual fault or outage. As an example, should an office of 20 people need to perform a 10-minute update to each of their PCs, the combined loss to business productivity would total over three hours. A proactive support approach ensures that this type of activity happens out of hours or when convenient for your business.
Network checks
Your IT network is the central nervous system of your IT setup. We, therefore, spend time on Proactive General Maintenance to check the following:
- The health of switches and routers.
- Checks on firewalls to ensure you are fully protected.
- Review the internet connection to ensure the best possible speed.
- Review the security of your Wi-Fi setup.
Server care
Whether a physical server or cloud setup, our engineers monitor and review the following items to ensure the health of your setup:
- Check event logs for fault patterns.
- Test that backups are working correctly (including checks that files can be retrieved).
- Review of hardware – checking RAID Arrays and other components are working correctly.
- Inspect available disk space and Exchange databases to ensure sufficient memory.
- Perform necessary updates and patching.
Workstation checks
While network and server checks are important, the items most likely to cause day-to-day staff disruption are PCs and laptops. We therefore perform proactive IT maintenance to cover some of the common issues that can slow users down:
- Check of available disk space on PCs.
- Perform or schedule updates (as convenient).
- Check anti-virus protection.
- Clear temporary cache for improved performance.
- Scan for malware.
- Review PC hardware to check for slowing and other signs that components may be failing.
Wider checks and planning
As part of a holistic approach to proactive IT maintenance, Akita will also review where IT solutions might help reduce inefficiencies, create cost-savings or streamline business processes.
We’ll also take the time to address individual user queries. Often staff members may not think that a small issue is worth logging as a support ticket. Over time, these issues can amount to sizable downtime. Proactive General Maintenance gives time to fixing those small issues, helping staff save time and work more efficiently.
View more about how our proactive support works:
