Managed Services
The reactive approach to IT involves waiting until something breaks, and then after identifying that issue (which may take hours or even days to achieve) attempting to repair the issue or company asset that your business may very well rely on to function on a daily basis.
Note: Don’t feel ashamed if you’re company follows this approach. Believe it or not, I’ve even seen this type of approach practiced by IT Solutions Providers, whom you’d figure would realize the importance of being prepared for IT disasters.
The problem with this approach is that depending on what breaks, and how, you may run the risk of going out of business (depending on the extent of income lost, and/or the impact of the issue itself). If this is a chance you cannot, and are not, willing to take, then the obvious solution is to take a different approach. “What alternative is there?,” you ask. The answer is to take a proactive approach. Such an approach involves constant and repetitive monitoring of company assets, such as desktops, printers, servers, routers, firewalls, load balancers, etc… In addition, it involves trending, to forecast when hardware will no longer meet the demands being placed on it, so that preparations and/or purchases can be made ahead of time, thereby enabling a company to minimize down time (Note: This will also minimize cost, as your company will be less likely to make a “Panic Purchase”, and over pay for replacement software and/or hardware). Finally, it involves identifying issues (or the warning signs of emerging issues) as soon as they rear their ugly heads. After all, the faster you respond to an issue, the less likely that issue is to negatively impact your business.
If up-time is essential to your business, and if this sounds like an approach you’d like to transition to, then My Webtek has the perfect solution for you. It is called Managed Services, and it is something that we offer, and which we will tailor to your specific needs, business and/or industry. Using state-of-the-art technology, our My Metrics offering will monitor your company’s real-time system and network performance, vulnerabilities, and security threats. On a monthly basis we will also assess and analyze trends (and deliver our findings in a formal report), showing you things like the average system resource consumption (i.e.; CPU, Memory, Disk space, etc…), account activity, potential security holes and/or security violations (or attempted violations). We will also provide a means for regular software and operating system patching, remote access, and so much more.
Our solution double's as a secure form of remote access, from anywhere in the world that Internet access is available, and triples as an alerting system, so that if something breaks over night, or in the background, you can be alerted to it as fast as possible, thereby giving you the option to act on an IT-related disaster, before it starts affecting your business. We even sell this offering to company's who have their own internal IT departments, as it can be used to supplement over-utilized IT staff, and can help in times when buget restraints won't afford you the opportunity to hire another technician.
Our My Metrics program can automate nearly 100% of all preventative maintenance tasks. Things like disk defrags, checking Event Viewer logs, running Disk Cleanups, performing Temp file removals, Temporary Internet file removals, Cookie removals, checking on backups, checking on antivirus to ensure it's backed up and scanning regularly (and that it doesn't find something it can't clean), watching the perimeter of your network (i.e.; whether someone's attacking your router), analyzing the amount of bandwidth sent across switch ports or thru your router, and nearly everything else you can imagine. It quite literally makes maintaining a network as simple as reading emails. The solution does all the work, unless physical remediation is needed. But at that point, all of your network assets (or customer's assets, if you're a reseller) are accessible from one central, secure location. And if that wasn't good enough, remote access includes the ability to remediate more than 85% of all IT-related issues behind the scenes, using a built-in, ingeneous collection of troubleshooting tools. This means your employees (or customer's end users, if you're a reseller) can continue working while we/you work on their systems, which in essence saves you from paying their hourly wages for NO work (or in essence, saves you from losing money)!!! In fact, because our offering logs everything in a readily available and accessible report that can be exported to PDF or CSV format (all of which is accessible securely from the web), and/or reports on all issues via email, you can regularly review the results of diagnostic testing that is performed round-the-clock on your systems (or customer's systems, if you're a reseller) by our My Metrics offering, thereby reducing downtime associated with more than 75% of all issues experienced (i.e.; it almost eliminates the entire diagnostic process used to find out what the cause of an issue is, what the symptoms are, and much more, thereby allowing you to get things back up and running ASAP). For the average customer without an IT department or provider, but rather one who's looking, using this solution will reduce your IT bill, because diagnostics cost money. Hence, if it takes 2-3 minutes to troubleshoot an issue, it's a heck of a lot less expensive than an hour, 2 hours, 6-8 hours, a day, or longer.
Furthermore, the toolsets available for use in the various different types of remote access offered (RDP, VNC, Remote Support Manager, RAdmin, etc...) make you not only capable as a tech, of providing support without traveling (for those of you interested in being resellers), it can also allow you to work in the background while your end users continue working (i.e.; without disrupting them nearly 90% of the time). Plus, an optional Environmental Manager functionality allows an easy interface for creating login scripts, printer assignments, mapping network drives, mapping shortcuts, and much more, enabling one person to literally manage hundreds of devices with very little effort. For the IT manager or concerned business owner, other features like "Monitor Host Screen" can allow you to view an employee's screen secretly, without their knowledge, to determine whether inappropriate use of your systems or data is occurring (this feature has other uses as well, such as for viewing an end user's screen for errors they're calling you about, without necessarily having to take control of their systems, mouse and keyboard, and has an option to notify end users of your viewing their screens, in case they are writing a private email, or what have you.). Please note, however, that it is important to inform your employees before hand, when looking to use this particular feature to monitor employee behavior (to protect your rights), that the system they are using is company property, and that they have no expectation of privary. This should actually be done in writing, put as something they should sign as having read and understood. We also offer policy management services, should you want or need any of the following documents to be created for you, or if you perhaps just don't know what to include: Disaster Recovery Policy, Acceptable Use Policy, User Account Policy, Remote Access Policy (if applicable), Password Protection Policy, Internet Use Policy, or LAN Security Policy.