Would you buy an expensive car but balk at the cost of maintaining it? Oil changes, tire rotations, brake repairs and other regular maintenance tasks are essential to keeping your car in perfect condition. If you skimp on an IT maintenance plan, soon or later you’ll need a costly repair, plus you won’t be able to use your car while it’s in the shop.
Regular maintenance is just as important for your network. When you don’t have an IT maintenance plan, your system is more likely to malfunction, which can cause downtime and even impact your sales. If you’re still not sure whether you need a maintenance plan, these five reasons may just change your mind.
Reason #1: Possible Failure Points are Identified and Corrected
Regular maintenance assessments identify potential problems and weaknesses in your network, allowing you to correct the issues before they can damage your system. The SOHO Solutions IT Preventative Maintenance Plan combines your regularly-scheduled network maintenance with an analysis of the current trends you’re experiencing. This often enables you to predict network failures before they occur. The plan also includes 24/7 network analysis and regular, on-site preventive maintenance for a fixed monthly cost.
Reason #2: Your System Receives the Most Recent Versions of Virus and Malware Protection
Cyber criminals are an industrious bunch. They’re constantly developing sophisticated viruses and malware that can destroy the data stored in your network and corrupt your systems and equipment. As part of your IT maintenance plan, you’ll receive patches and monthly security updates for your servers and firewalls. Your IT consultants will also monitor your system 24/7 for signs of intrusions and quickly address the problem if they do notice a hacking attempt.
Reason #3: Critical Information Won’t Be Lost if Your System Crashes
Could you continue to do business if the information in your network was gone forever? Whether you experience a hard drive crash or a cyberattack, you won’t lose valuable data if your maintenance plan includes backup monitoring, including testing to ensure that all of your crucial files back up completely every day. Ongoing testing of your backup system is an important part of a good maintenance plan. After all, you wouldn’t want to find out that your backups are unusable after you experience a crash.
Reason #4: You Won’t Experience System Slowdowns
Diagnostic programs designed to identity issues that can affect performance are an important part of network maintenance. For example, your network can slow down significantly if it’s clogged with old, unneeded program files. After system health checks and speed tests identify the source of the problem, the old files will be automatically removed, boosting the speed of your system.
Reason #5: You’ll Experience Less Downtime
Do you regard downtime as just an unavoidable part of doing business in the digital age? Unfortunately, downtime isn’t just an inconvenience, but can cost you sales and hamper your productivity. Downtime costs companies as much as $300,000 per hour, depending on the type and size of the business. Although it may impossible to completely eliminate downtime, you can drastically reduce it with a comprehensive IT maintenance plan that searches for and corrects errors, weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
Would you like to maximize your uptime and reduce the risk of malfunctions, intrusions and crashes? SOHO Solutions’ comprehensive Preventative IT Maintenance Plan offers the ideal way to maintain the efficiency of your network. Get in touch with us to learn about plan features and options.