IT Managed Services – What is it? When do you need it? And Why it is good for you?
What is it?

Regardless of your business size, IT is the crucial backbone of many businesses. This creates the requirement of continuous improvement to your IT System as you try to keep up with the latest technological growth and competitors in your market. However, in the current era of constant technology growth, especially with the boom of cloud-based technology, the choice of managing and developing everything on your own is no longer optimal.

This is where IT Management Services providers, like I-Net Dynamics,  come into the picture to help businesses like yours to focus on their main job – running their business efficiently and serving their clients.  IT Managed Services usually consists of operational support, monitoring, maintenance to security, and analysis.

A trustworthy provider in IT services should be a single point of contact with high-quality services with more manageable and predictable costs. You would be able to simply delegate your IT tasks to IT experts to boost your productivity.

When do you need it?

Below are some scenarios that will indicate the need for a IT Managed Service provider. If you check off more than two of these scenarios, you should consider acquiring an IT Managed Services vendor.

– You find that your IT system is not capable of handling your daily workload.
– Your IT department is overworked and understaffed.
– You have difficulties in planning your IT plans as well as evaluating the cost.
– You have frequent downtime or outages.
– You do not have frequent updates or reports of your system health and find it difficult to identify critical issues.
– You are not fully confident in your backup and recovery plan.

IT Managed Services has also constantly been evolving with more services and also, going alongside the trend of cloud, many services are offered as cloud services with higher availability and real-time analysis.

Why is IT managed services a good choice for you?

● Priority Focus: If you choose to delegate IT services, you do not have to worry about and invest heavily to meet the crucial IT needs in many aspects, for example, monitoring, analysis, security, and performance. Your resources and manpower are prioritized to your core business.

● A single point of contact for a wide range of professional services: working with a competent service provider should give you better peace of mind. I-Net Dynamics can perform a throughout IT assessment of your current physical and virtual IT infrastructures. Based on it, we can identify weakness and points for improvements, and create a strategic IT plan combining various services such as backup services, anti-virus, replications, monitoring, and reporting.

Rather than staying in a reactive mode and wasting more money on hiring contractors when outages or issues occur, certified providers like I-Net Dynamics are committed to providing reliable, responsible and timely support, monitoring, maintenance and reporting of your IT system.

● Cost Efficiency: with our expertise in IT, we can evaluate and develop a strategic IT plan for your business as well as prepare for your growth. With a long -term plan in place, I-Net Dynamics can work together with you to manage your IT costs in the long-run.

You no longer have to invest heavily in your research and development of an in-house IT solution. For a similar level of IT system, services generally come at a better price. Moreover, some other kinds of costs, such as hiring and training IT experts are handled by managed services providers. You have access to top-tier certified IT experts at much lower costs.

● High Availability with Constant Monitoring and Support: 24/7 monitoring is available to ensure your business productivity and minimize all potential downtime. Through proactive monitoring and maintenance, your IT systems become more resilient; as a result, your business productivity and reliability are enhanced.

● High Scalability and Readiness for Growth: Managed services are also easier to scale to meet your growth needs. IT managed services providers can carry out an assessment about newer demands and then scale to achieve these goals. In these scenarios, a faster solution is also provided without a long time for R&D and then deployment from your side. The big part is now absorbed and fulfilled by the provider.

● Security and Risk Management: Apart from general operational tasks, services including anti-virus, backup, and replication are available to make your business as disaster-proof as possible. Even in the cases of outages or downtime, you can be confident that an appropriate action plan will be performed to protect your data and business.

Furthermore, in many countries, your IT system might have to meet several security compliance requirements. These demands are better left for the experts.

IT providers like us consist of professionals that always stay up-to-date with the advancement of technologies and work with big partners to provide you enterprise level products at a more affordable cost.

Overall, managed services are a practical and effective solution for many businesses. Apart from the mentioned benefits, some points should be noted that to utilize any kind of products and services, you should consider providers with a good track of records, then, contact and work closely with them for an initial assessment. If you are interested in a local and reliable provider, please contact us here.

By Paris for I-Net Dynamics

The consequences of a hard disk crash can be difficult to bear for your business, server hard drives are where you hold all your important data, and any damage to it can put your business at risk. Studies have shown that the risk of hard drive failure rates can be as high as 14%, unlike the typical 2% – 3% that are being promoted.

The reasons for a hard drive failure can range from hardware issues to human errors. Once a hard drive has failed, it can be extremely difficult, expensive and time-consuming to recover the lost data. And in some unfortunate situations, the data may not be recoverable at all. In most cases, only a small portion of data will be lost, however, what can be recovered and what is lost are totally beyond control.

From a business point of view, any type of hard drive failure can be financially damaging or worse, bankrupting. Critical business data loss such as customer information, financial transactions, and sales data can take months to recover from. Take financial data as an example: without a healthy hard drive, the accounting department would have to manually record multiple day-to-day transactions and after the system is back up (usually after a few months), have key them into the system all over again manually which might increase the chances of human error, overlap in data and is extremely time consuming,

Many companies often struggle with a dilemma upon hard disk failure – to buy a new system, or to wait for the old ones to be recovered?  Whichever option is taken, business still must absorb the opportunity costs during the long wait time and possibly additional expenses associated with recovery of data or purchase of new hard disk.

Fortunately, there are still ways for companies to save themselves from being in any of the situation above – keeping a healthy hard drive environment and having sufficient data backup solutions.

Data Backup Solutions 

It should be common place for companies to ensure all its important data are backed up constantly lest anything happens to the physical hard disks. One of the most common backup strategy is “3-2-1”. The name directly reminds you that any business needs at least 3 copies of data, 2 onsite but on different machines, and 1 offsite copy.

While this strategy is well known, it is sadly not widely used. Throughout our time in this industry, we have come across several businesses that had to suffer losses because their data backup were on the same server. And before they could apply the “3-2-1” strategy, they had to painfully send their hard drives away for recovery.

Hard Drive Monitoring 

Having 3 copies of backup is essential to protect business in the event of hard drive failure. However, besides having enough data backups, there is another layer of prevention that companies can use.  Companies can, instead of only focusing on preventive measures (making sure to use the 3-2-1 strategy when backing up), also implement proactive measures to data backup.

The N-able monitoring software tools can help businesses prevent hard drive crashes by informing you of your hard-disks’ health status and inform you of any issues in advance. With the ability to notify you when the drive is almost full, or when the warranty is expired, for instance, this monitoring tool allows companies to proactively act before anything happens.

The consequences of a Hard disk crash are countless and can be devastating to anyone who is not prepared.  Don’t take chances and turn your business into statistics, start backing up your data and monitor your hard drive today.

Click here for more information about i-Net’s proactive IT Managed Services, or here for our Offsite Backup Solutions.