An ounce of prevention…

By Bret Jones, PolarStar’s Practice Manager

You’ve heard it before, and intuitively, you know it’s right.  Effort spent anticipating and protecting against problems saves money compared to the cost of fixing problems after they occur.

Before managed services came along, we were often frustrated when we were called in to resolve a network problem that we could have easily helped the client avoid in the first place if we had somehow been aware about the status of the client’s network in advance.

For example, we once were called in to help after a client lost all the data on their main server, including the company’s email.  This client had not done a good system backup for at least a month.  No one had checked to see if their backups were being made correctly. They had simply been inserting tapes every day.  Because a valid recent backup was not available, this client needed to send their server disks to a data recovery firm.  Even after a $15,000 expense for trying, they didn’t get all their data back. When all factors were included, including the cost of lost productivity by corporate staff due to dealing with the problem, the total cost of not having a recent backup in just this one instance would have paid for much more than one entire year’s preventive care.

In our experience, the four most common types of problems that can be completely avoided with proper preventive care are:

1. Data loss attributable to people’s inattention to their backups.  This can be a tragedy as with the example mentioned above.
2. People don’t protect themselves with antivirus software, costing their companies a lot of time and money when they get infected, then infect others.
3. Server patches aren’t kept current, which can make systems vulnerable to security breaches, a higher level of system instability and other problems.
4. Allowing inexperienced or unqualified people to perform server or network maintenance have been very costly to many organizations.  We have seen multiple occasions where a well-meaning individual has cost days of downtime because they did not understand the ramifications of their actions.

If you are not confident about any aspect of your network, including the items mentioned above, Polar Systems may be able to help.

Polar has been providing information technology service to the Pacific Northwest community for a quarter of a century, and we’ve seen all the horror stories. About seven years ago, we began exploring the concept of offering managed network services, putting in place a framework of procedures to keep clients’ networks healthy and avoid outages. 

About three years ago, the state of the art of remote monitoring and patch management tools had advanced to the point where we could reliably offer a pro-active network management service to our clients. Similar technologies had existed at the enterprise level, but the small business had been ignored up to that time.  The result is our PolarStar™ network services offering, a program of monitoring and preventive maintenance that keeps our clients’ networks healthy and productive.

Because Polar Systems is a pioneer in the proactive network services marketplace, we have the most experience and we offer the broadest range of services. For companies and organizations that have no in-house IT resources, we fill that role completely.  For others that have a dedicated IT staff, we’ll handle the proactive maintenance and general administrative tasks that bog down the internal IT team. Our clients’ internal IT staff can concentrate on the applications and strategic issues that are unique to their business, while not being burdened with the “grunt work”. Case study after case study indicate that businesses that operate in this fashion have lowered their overall IT costs and substantially improved the efficiency (not to mention the mood) of their dedicated IT staff.   

We help IT departments put in place best practices to insure that things are done right.  As an example of how things can go wrong, one of our managed services clients was installing an application without testing it.  The application caused blue screen crashes to propagate among the clients’ remotely-attached client computers.  We were able to halt the problem remotely and fix it quickly using our tools before additional damage was done.

It really does cost less to prevent problems than to fix them.  Polar Systems’ PolarStar service is able to perform maintenance that might be otherwise missed.  Potential problems are diagnosed and handled ahead of time before the problem can express itself.  With the care that Polar Systems provides, our customers will be down less often.  And we don’t always need to drop by your office.  90% of problems can be fixed remotely.

 

Bret Jones is PolarStar’s Practice Manager, responsible for the daily management and development of PolarStar services. Bret has been with Polar Systems since 1998. He is a skilled Network Engineer and holds a degree in Psychology from Linfield College.