They say that money makes the world go ’round. While this might be the case, the truth is that money is not our most valuable asset. We can make more money, find more money, earn more money…but there is something we can’t make more of, find more of, or earn more of. There is one asset that, once we use it, it’s gone. That’s time.
Time is our most valued possession. There are only so many hours in the day, so many days in the week, so many weeks in a month, etc. And it is important, especially in the business world, that we spend our time very wisely, because once we use it, we can’t get it back. That’s why choosing your IT support for your company is so important. Especially around here, in the Washington DC metro area, which is considered to be the center of many businesses, you need your computer to be running smoothly all the time- because you don’t have the time to waste fixing it.
When your computer unexpectedly encounters a virus, or suddenly crashes, or slows to a crawl without warning, or freezes up, it interrupts the steady flow of your day. It throws a huge monkey wrench into the plans you so carefully drew up, and forces you to rearrange your entire schedule. This is especially true when the problem has no clear-cut solution.
The Benefits of Quality IT Support
Here are a few things a good IT support company will do to help you minimize time spent on computer issues, and maximize time spent on more important things:
- Proactive monitoring and maintenance. These days, the technology is available for many IT problems to be detected the moment of, or even before they occur. IT support companies can monitor your desktops, firewalls, servers, and switches, and make sure they are all running at peak efficiency all the time. If there is an issue detected, such as a hard drive starts to run out of space, or a server starts slowing down, there are programs that will send alerts to your IT support company, and they will take the necessary steps to fix these issues, before larger problems, like server crashes, ever happen. Most of the time, you won’t even know that they had to fix anything, since these programs allow work to be done behind-the-scenes.
- After-hours support. Typical nine-to-five work hours are becoming rarer in today’s companies. With the ability now to work anytime, from anywhere, many companies (and employees) are taking advantage of this to work at off hours. This allows for more travel, more productivity, and flexible schedules that can work around school and children. The trouble is, IT problems don’t tend to wait for normal work hours, and can occur anytime. Your IT support company should have some type of solution in place so that you can be helped after-hours, whether it is an on-call engineer, or a third-party helpdesk.
measures can’t be taken to minimize the damage. On the contrary, with a good backup system in place, and a seamless solution for recovering the data from the backups if needed, the amount of downtime for your company can be reduced to a matter of hours. This might seem like a lot, but in comparison to being down for a few days, or even a week, a couple of hours is much easier to recover from.
At the end of the day, how you choose to spend your time is a big decision. There are so many things that you need to accomplish every day, and you can’t afford to be held up by obstacles that are outside the realm of your control. After all, there are only 24 hours in the day. If four of them are spent waiting on your IT support, that’s four hours you can never get back. So make sure your IT support company knows just how important your time is, and they have resources in place to make sure you can use that time in the best possible way.