The potential for disaster narrowly avoided with swift MSP services from SMB Solutions
Small to mid-sized business owners usually don’t have the time to take care of IT issues on top of all the other duties that come with owning and operating a business.
More often than not, these business owners will outsource their IT needs to a professional so they can continue focusing on building their business, which is great! That’s what IT professionals are here for. But as a business owner, have you ever taken the time to see what your IT professional is doing for you after the initial sign up? Do you know if you are getting bang for your buck?
Too many times we come into contact with business owners who think they’re getting good service from an IT professional or MSP provider who appears to have everything under control. But upon taking a closer look, everything is not as it seems.
Subject X Case Study – A Cautionary Tale
Our case study today is an SMB Solutions Cloud Services MSP client who thought they had an IT professional on their side. Subject X was paying this professional to work multiple days a week to manage the IT-related tasks that they just didn’t have the time or expertise for, such as ensuring anti-virus software was up to date and functioning well, completing backups regularly, and maintaining onsite servers to keep their network running smoothly among other things.
With 2 interstate offices and over a dozen staff members in each, the technology Subject X depends on every day is essential. Once the SMB MSP team came on board to take over the business IT management, we realised just how dangerously close this network was to irreversible damage and collapse.
Here are just a few things we discovered that could’ve sent the company into chaos:
- The onsite servers had not been restarted in 3 years – Servers require regular updates and restarts to remain functioning at a high level. Failure to do so could cause slower network performance, missed bugs and internal issues, or even an automatic restart of the servers at an inconvenient time causing a network outage, perhaps in the middle of a busy workday, which is not ideal.
- No regular or consistent backups had been completed since the initial software was setup – BACKUPS ARE ESSENTIAL!! No matter who you speak to in the IT industry, everyone will tell you just how important backups are. Having backups completed regularly means you are prepared for any disaster, whether it be an office fire or ransomware. Even better if you are doing cloud to cloud backups!
- The network was incorrectly set up and full of inconsistencies – If you were to build a building but the foundation was full of holes and cracks, it would only be a matter of time before the whole thing came tumbling down. Building a reliable network is the same – keeping accounts, names and software uniform is essential to building a strong network. This means if anyone tried to hack or change anything in your network, it’s easier to spot as it is now out of place and no longer uniform like the rest.
SMB Solutions MSP Services started in April 2020 for this exact reason – to help small to mid-sized business owners feel confident and in control of the technology and associated processes that they use every day.
We understand that every business is different and therefore has different needs, priorities, budgets and issues to overcome. This is why we have created the “Good, Better, Best” system so you get to choose what services you want based on what you need and how much you want to spend.
Visit the Managed Services page on our website for more information or get in touch with the SMB Solutions support team today to find out more.