IT maintenance is key for three reasons; firstly, IT maintenance helps equipment such as laptops and desktops perform to the best of their ability. Any flaws can be corrected by routine and regular IT maintenance. It also helps with meeting compliance and data protection standards where necessary.
Secondly, effective maintenance helps improve your cyber security. The National Cyber Security Centre cite that attackers exploit flaws in IT equipment and infrastructure in the majority of common cyber-attacks. With IT maintenance, you can close easy-to-access holes in your business that could result is severe business disruption.
Thirdly, by maintaining your IT effectively, you can reduce costs incurred by IT systems by increasing their life span and their operational efficiency.
In this blog, we look at what IT maintenance is, its role in business operations, and why it is important.
What does basic IT maintenance cover?
Basic IT maintenance covers several areas, each of which should be reviewed on a repeating schedule to maintain good hygiene. These areas include:
- Patch Management – this is the process of updating systems and software. Often the update, or ‘patch’ will correct known security flaws, as well as improve performance.
- Monitoring – keeping an eye on your systems and their performance means that you identify issues quickly.
- Security Policies – by having a set of standards that must be met, you can reduce the likelihood that your business becomes a victim of cybercrime. These can include who can access what information, as well as password requirements including two-factor authentication.
- Business Continuity Procedures – it’s no secret that backups are important. If the worst happens (for example, there is an issue with your laptop or your server is compromised), you can restore your work and documents using a backup. This is not just important for hardware in the office such as computers and servers, but any cloud storage you may have (for example, Microsoft Sharepoint or Google Drive). By doing this, you can restore key business documents to the state that they were last in.
- Training for staff – when a staff member joins your business, it’s important that they know how the systems they use work. This can be something straightforward, such as a handbook, or more involved sessions for staff in the workaplace.
The Three Types of IT Maintenance
There are three main types of IT maintenance:
Preventative
Preventative IT maintenance is anything designed to stop things going wrong in the first place. This could include having an up-to-date anti-virus program installed (such as Microsoft Defender), regular patch management and security updates being installed, and the use of diagnostic tools that will identify vulnerabilities (or areas that could leave you exposed to a cyber-attack). Such tools are regularly used by IT support and maintenance providers and require specialist knowledge.
Corrective
Corrective IT maintenance is there to resolve issues when they arise. In technology, nothing works 100% of the time, whether owing to human error or system malfunction. Corrective IT maintenance could be something like restoring a backup of a document to a computer. Other times, this could be something more complex that requires in-depth knowledge of the technology you are running and its processes. This is when you would likely consult an IT support and maintenance company.
Proactive
Proactive IT maintenance means that you are doing everything you can to keep systems optimised and performing well. It would be easy to assume that upgrading hardware and software whenever possible is the best way of working. In fact, it can be counter-productive. New software can take time to find its stride, and moving staff over wholesale to new systems can be disruptive. Proactive IT maintenance (sometimes called evolutionary maintenance) is the process of evolving IT systems when the time is right, specifically when the benefit to the organisation outweighs any potentially negative impact (such as the cost of upgrading a system balance against the benefit of upgrading).
Why Is Maintenance Important?
IT maintenance is important for three reasons: security, optimisation, and cost-efficiency. Effective and appropriate IT maintenance exists to support the cyber security of your business (which keeps your business information secure) and optimise the IT systems (which improves the efficiency of staff and operations).
It would be a lie to say that any business is secure 100% of the time (threat actors dedicate lots of time to finding elements of IT systems that they can exploit without their victim knowing that this element is vulnerable. These are known as zero-day vulnerabilities). However, IT maintenance stops companies making a hacker’s job easy. By implementing IT maintenance and services from a third party (usually the most cost-effective way of performing IT maintenance, particularly for small and medium–sized businesses), you are greatly reducing the risk of your company falling prey to hackers.
IT maintenance also helps optimise the performance of business IT equipment and services. As an example, if a business works with a large amount of data, having a process that enables staff to work with that data quickly and safely is important. There are different ways in which that can be done, so choosing the way that works best for your business is a crucial part of IT maintenance.
Lastly, IT maintenance helps reduce costs over time by eliminating the need to pay for emergency support costs, replacing hardware if it stops working prematurely, and data recovery if something corrupts your company files.
How Do You Get Started with IT Maintenance?
It’s never too late to get started with IT maintenance. Time is always the enemy, particularly as a small business, and so the best way to get started with IT maintenance is to consult a specialist IT support company (such as CloudTech24), asking them how they perform routine IT maintenance. Once you have an answer that works best for you and your business, it’s important to begin as soon as possible to reduce the risk to your business and operations.
