If you are responsible to keep your organisation’s IT, phones and printers running how do you approach maintenance? Do you ignore maintenance or do you find it difficult to know what work needs to be done. A best practice maintenance approach is required and Roshtech recommends that clients’ IT systems are maintained routinely.
Best practice maintenance approach
With everybody always busy keeping up with the day to day operations and projects, maintenance often slips away unnoticed. Eventually it will catch-up with you as ignoring maintenance is like not servicing your car. At some stage you will be standing on the side of the road waiting for a tow truck. The alternative is to be proactive and on the front foot, just like an airline with a schedule and flights that leave on time.
Monthly maintenance
A simple approach to maintaining your systems is to implement proactive maintenance on a scheduled monthly basis. Most issues can be picked up in advance of problems arising and dealt with before any outages are involved.
Scheduled maintenance is recommended by Microsoft on all servers and infrastructure., Even desktops will benefit from a quick preventative maintenance task to keep them in reliable working order.
Recommendation
Roshtech recommends the following proactive maintenance tasks be performed on a regular basis
- Monthly proactive maintenance
- 6-monthly server recovery simulations
- Documentation updates
Costs
The ongoing costs of implementing the best practice maintenance approach for your IT systems is far less than avoiding it and then paying large rectification bills when systems fail. We often go to new sites where the backups have never been tested. Roshtech recommends that backups are fully tested every 6 months so that you can see a full recovery of your servers booting up on different hardware. Don’t forget that Roshtech provides free loan servers to be used for server recoveries.