Most businesses think of IT infrastructure in the same way they think of plumbing or running water – Its just ‘there’ and its not until it breaks that you realise how reliant you are on working IT kit for your day to day operations. Downtime = huge £££ losses
How much does it cost to have employees twiddling their thumbs waiting for technology to ‘catch up’ ?
On average it costs businesses over £65k for each HOUR lost due to downtime – Can you afford to lose that much money?
Over the years we have routinely helped customers who have sadly considered IT infrastructure as just something that comes with their premises much in the same way that most of us would consider our central heating boiler to just be working away in the background but the truth is that IT infrastructure is so critical to just about any business that losing even part of it causes huge problems. Invariably we are helping new customers when ‘downtime’ has already reared its ugly head.
FACT – Fixing IT downtime issues is FAR more expensive than preventing IT issues.
A good IT strategy takes into account 3 main elements.
Get the right kit, not the most expensive
It would be quite easy to assume that the most expensive IT kit is by default the best , in fact we have come across many other MSPs that take this approach but fundamentally its the wrong approach.
A Ferrari is more expensive than a transit van but it would be no good as a delivery van, likewise a super lightweight £2000 laptop is not going to be better for an office based worker who needs extra hard drive space that a desktop PC affords.
Avoiding downtime starts with investing in the right kit for the job.
Keep everything up to date and backed up
So you have the right kit and everything is working fine but you are still not fully sorted yet. The next downtime mitigation strategy is to make sure you keep everything up to date and monitored so things like security patches, program updates, file sanitation, and routine performance monitoring. Ensuring all your key data is backed up (check out our backup strategy blog here)
Replace kit when required not when its broken
Waiting until a computer or server fails or becomes unusably slow or out of date before replacing is just bad practice. Back to the car analogy if you ran a fleet of taxis you would not wait until they were completely worn out before replacing would you, You would replace when the costs to keep them maintained and serviceable is not longer financially viable and the same is true of IT equipment.
We suggest as a rule of thumb that a desktop computer is replaced every 3 years and a laptop every 18 months. Of course equipment can last longer than this but beyond these timescales you are likely to have degraded performance costing your business in lost productivity and invariably you will be out of warranty for any hardware failures. Compared to wasted employee hours or data loss replacing IT equipment is CHEAP.
Get in touch today to find out how our service plans can get you IT sorted, leave us to do the hard work so you can get on with what you do best.