As your business grows and shifts, managing your technology can become increasingly complicated. It can get to the point where properly taking care of your IT and supporting your users is a full time job. If you are just calling a computer person to come and fix problems when you bump into them, then you might have potential consequences to deal with later that could cost your organization a lot of time and money.
Are You Maintaining and Updating Antivirus and Basic Security Software?
You might think keeping the antivirus updated on your computer is fairly simple, but is every user in your organization doing it religiously? Are scans being run regularly? Who is dealing with it when an issue occurs—is it even getting reported?
While cybersecurity is something that all end users need to be trained on, the onus shouldn’t be on them to maintain their workstation. Having a centralized security solution in place that doesn’t rely on the users goes a long way, but you still want someone to manage it and check it daily to ensure that there aren’t problems that might be putting you at risk.
Are You Reviewing Daily Backups?
When it comes to IT, your data is everything. With modern backup standards and best practices, there is no excuse for your organization to even have the slightest risk of data loss. While modern backup solutions can be automated, secured, and have their own redundancies, it’s still important to have someone manually review the backup logs and ensure that the device is, in fact, doing its job.
It’s absolutely critical that backup logs are reviewed and that backups are checked for corruption. If this isn’t getting done, you could be out of luck in the event that you need to restore from a backup, which defeats the entire purpose of having the infrastructure.
We recommend that once a week, the daily backup check includes a random restore to ensure that everything is working and that the files that are being backed up are recoverable. It shouldn’t stop there either. Every month or at least every quarter, a more thorough integrity check should be performed. We can’t stress enough how important your backup is.
Are You Reviewing Event Logs on Servers?
This is a pretty simple task, but it is so critical when it comes to preventing issues. Your servers (and your workstations for that matter) produce in-depth logs. These can reveal issues that might not be affecting your staff yet but could in the near future. For instance, hard drives might sometimes report an error to the log, but will still work fine for days, weeks, or even months. Detecting this early gives you time to order a replacement part, perform a migration, and test things on your timetable, instead of going into emergency mode and dealing with downtime.
Are You Checking for Disk Space Issues?
When a hard drive gets too full, it can start to degrade the performance of the device. It’s not about how many files are on the drive or the desktop, but more about allowing the device to use the hard drive for temporary storage.
A full hard drive can cause network bottleneck issues, make it impossible to get work done in a line of business application, and cause a lot of headache for some or all of your staff.
It’s an easy fix, when handled proactively. During regular maintenance, a tech can determine if the hard drive usage is legitimate or if temporary files and cache need to be purged, and they can order additional storage if needed. Trying to make this determination when it is already affecting most of your company causes unnecessary chaos and wastes a lot of resources.
Who is Responsible for Windows and Server Updates?
At least once a month, Microsoft releases security updates and product updates for its operating systems, including Windows 10, Windows 11, and their Server OSes. If you get behind on your updates, it can take longer to apply them all, or cause conflicts that prevent you from easily running your updates.
In other words, it’s something that needs to be taken care of regularly, and it’s best if updates are deployed in a staging environment before being deployed, to ensure that the update itself doesn’t disrupt your business. This shouldn’t be the responsibility of your end users.
Who is Responsible for Software Updates and Patches?
All of the software you use in your business will have its own timeline and schedule for releasing security updates, product updates, and patches. Depending on the application and the developer, updates could be released as often as daily, or might only happen every few months. These updates might be as simple as clicking “update” or they may require a complex process of tasks to perform safely and correctly. A good IT department would have each application thoroughly documented and have processes down to handle this, which is why leaving it in the hands of a less-technical end-user probably isn’t a great idea.
Who is Reviewing Wi-Fi, Firewall, and VPN Access Logs?
The better question might be “Who is actually accessing your network?” Are you aware of unauthorized access? Are you aware of unauthorized applications accessing the network?
One of the telltale signs of a security breach or another type of attack is problematic traffic spikes and other unexpected network events. Detecting these early can prevent a whole lot of issues before they turn into a catastrophic problem.
Who’s Supporting Your Staff with the Tech Support They Need?
While this list isn’t everything that should be getting done on a regular basis for your organization’s IT, each one of these tasks is critical to maintaining smooth operations and avoiding expensive downtime. On top of all of this, you need someone who can handle the day-to-day questions and support requests from your staff. When something goes wrong, who is there to fix it? Do you have to wait hours, or even days, for a simple issue to get fixed? Are issues happening because the tasks above aren’t getting done properly?
Working with North Central Technologies provides huge benefits compared to just calling a computer person when something is broken. In fact, when we work closely with a business like yours, you’ll find that you don’t have to call technical support nearly as often, because many issues can be prevented—then we’re just here to help your users become more effective at working with the technology you’ve invested in!
Want to see just how good things can get? Give us a call at North Central Technologies to get started.
