Lets go through a scenario that I’m sure you have known someone in, and maybe you’re even in right now. You’re a small business and you’re growing. That’s an absolutely wonderful thing! But for you, it’s starting to cause you some unforeseen headaches. You’ve been around technology since you were a kid so you have been handling “all of the computers” in your office but you’re starting to realize a few things. First off, the more workstations you add to your business and the more users are on them, there seems to be an exponential number of daily problems that are coming up. The second is quite simple… you don’t have the time to be sinking in to fixing broken computers anymore. More and more of your fellow co-workers are reaching out to you every single day because of credential problems, slow computers, programs crashing, security issues. It’s time for you to do something.
So you do a quick search in your area thinking that you really need to find a “computer repair shop”, so that’s what you look for. In your mind, that’s what you need. Currently when things are wrong, you go and “fix Suzy’s computer”. So you feel that by default IT people “fix computers”. The misconception is coming from trying to solve the problem from the wrong direction. What if instead of sitting around and waiting on things to break, there was a way of anticipating problems and keeping them from happening in the first place? Well it’s your lucky day because those companies do exist but you just didn’t know what to look for until now. You need a Service Provider to administer all of your technology as a system instead of fixing broken machines.
Shifting from Reactive to Proactive
Computer repair companies work under the business model of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” so if there isn’t a visible problem with a computer, they have nothing to fix. So let’s touch on some of the down sides of that. First and foremost, in our mind, is: at the point a machine breaks, you have major problems. Not only is the hardware or software in need of repair, you now have an employee who can’t do their job. Their production suffers while they’re waiting for a fix, they’re holding up your process, preventing your company from making money, and on a personal level, they’re now really upset that their computer isn’t working again and they’re getting behind. So you place a call to Joe’s computer repair and he schedules someone to come out while your valued employee can’t do their job. There has to be a better way.
The other side of this is what Infihedron brings to our clients and is the Managed Service Provider model. Typically you will move to a more recurring maintenance and service model with a Service Provider because they’re doing work for you ALL of the time, most of the time without you even knowing it. MSP’s will install agents and monitoring equipment to review the status of not only and individual computer but your entire work environment. Many times we will know about a potential problem hours, days, or even weeks before it would actually shut down your computer, server, or network equipment. This gives true Service Providers the opportunity to start fixing the “problem” before you even know that it’s becoming a problem! We also have tools to begin working on your environment right here in our office so we can get started right away while your staff is still up and fully operational and you’re not stuck waiting for us to schedule an onsite visit.
Change your Networks Oil
My analogy for this is that it’s like your car. You could buy a brand new car right off the lot and then just start driving it everyday and never open the hood or look at anything on the car. The problem with that is, when something goes wrong, it’s going to go REALLY wrong. You’ve got 48,000 miles on your car and you are driving 75 down the interstate and boom, “out of nowhere, your tire just exploded”. So now, you are stuck on the side of the road in need of a tire. Since your tire violently blew out, you also just destroyed your rim and flung your tire into your quarter panel. So now, you’re out the cost of a tow to a service shop, a new tire, a new rim, a rental car for a week, and body repair to the front end of your car. You think this sounds absurd? Of course you do, because in your mind you’re thinking “well at 48,000 miles, I would have had my car in for countless oil changes, tire rotations, fuel service, and they would have told me that my tires were dangerously thin” and you’re right! So why do you treat your computers any different than your car? If you had someone reviewing your computer environment regularly, they would have seen that your entire motherboard was running hot and cleaned out your power supply before it blew leaving you down for several days while it gets replaced. They could have seen the 24 errors a day that your computer is writing to an error log that you didn’t know existed, in order to see that your SQL database was having consistency errors that were spiraling out of control. Of course you found that out when your entire office was shut down during end of month processing. If you have someone looking at your computers with consistency, they can spot many of those problems before they become nightmares.
At the end of the day, your business environment is more than just a single computer, it’s a complex machine that should be maintained constantly. When you sit around and wait for things to go wrong, they’re going to go wrong and when they do, it’s probably going to be bad. As a full time Service Provider, our job is to be proactive in our search for trouble. We also spend time developing plans for getting you out of a bind should things actually go wrong. Is your break/fix computer repair company prepared for your network switch burning out, needing to be replaced and reconfigured while 24 of your users wait for their internet and server connectivity to come back? What about ransomware getting onto your server and erasing everything on your file and applications servers? How long is your business going to be down while you wait for that to get fixed over the next days/week? How much money did you just lose and can your business survive it? We ask you those questions because we want to prevent it from ever happening, not make money off of you hoping something breaks so we can fix it. Running a small business is hard enough, don’t wait around rolling the dice that things will continue to go smoothly, be prepared for when they don’t and then get back in business quickly to keep your customers happy. We are your IT department and treat your business like it’s our own.
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See how Infihedron can keep your system running like a well oiled machine.