By Jason Facer, Central Illinois Business Magazine contributor
In the June 2008 issue of the Central Illinois Business Magazine, I addressed the deteriorating economic conditions that dominated last summer’s headlines. More specifically, I urged local business owners to avoid reactionary decisions such as slashing their companies’ IT budgets. Instead, I recommended a proactive approach toward information technology as an effective means of keeping technology costs to a minimum during very difficult economic times.
The country’s economic crisis, of course, has deepened dramatically since my aforementioned article was published 11 months ago. Furthermore, the prospect of new taxes and other costs employers must absorb—such as COBRA insurance coverage for terminated employees—has many business owners scrambling just to keep the doors open. Decision-makers in every industry are combing the books in search of every possible way to reduce expenses—and company IT budgets are often at the top of the list of expenses to cut.
To be sure, each of must do whatever is necessary to survive these very uncertain—and, quite frankly, terrifying—economic times. That said, there is an additional way business owners can pare IT budgets without sacrificing performance or office productivity: adopting a proactive approach to business technology.
More specifically, implementing a network monitoring solution can drastically reduce your company’s technology expenditures. Such solutions monitor the devices on your office’s network—including servers, workstations, printers, and routers—and alert you to potentially disruptive—and expensive—issues developing within your company’s network. Network monitoring solutions notify your internal systems administrator or third-party service provider so that the issue may be resolved before it mushrooms into a problem that results in network downtime, lost productivity, and expensive hardware replacement purchases.
Consider, for example, the seemingly benign issue of a case fan failing inside your company’s file server. Left unchecked, this case fan failure can cause your server to overheat, destroying internal components and threatening the data stored on the server’s hard drives. A network monitoring solution, meanwhile, would notify your internal systems administrator or technology service provider of the case fan failure, facilitating the quick and efficient replacement of the fan before the potential for disaster can develop. Ultimately, in this example, network monitoring can mean the difference between the purchase of a $20 case fan and a half-hour of labor to install the new device and the complete loss of your company’s file server and an extremely labor-intensive effort to implement a new server and migrate your company’s data onto a machine that likely has cost your firm several thousand dollars.
Operating hand-in-hand with network monitoring to reduce business IT budgets is a scheduled series of routine maintenance work. This routine maintenance enables your company to address non-urgent IT concerns during a single session of work instead of as they are identified—an approach that can often result in your company being nickel-and-dimed with bills for service visits that could likely have waited until the next scheduled round of maintenance work. Additionally, routine maintenance ensures your network is up-to-date with its antivirus definitions, data backup program, operating system updates, security patches, and many other critical updates. These updates both ensure your network infrastructure operates at peak efficiency and protect your network against threats such as viruses and security vulnerabilities. (The highly-publicized Conficker virus—unleashed on April Fool’s Day—exploited computers and networks that had not applied critical system updates.)
The frequency with which routine maintenance work is performed is largely dependent on the size of your company’s network. While the industry’s best practices recommendation advises performing maintenance at least once per month, smaller, two- or three-person companies may elect to perform such maintenance on a quarterly basis. Conversely, larger firms may find it necessary to schedule maintenance work to be performed every other week to ensure every component of the network is analyzed and updated to deliver peak operational efficiency.
While trimming your company’s IT budget isn’t the answer to every challenge faced by businesses today, adopting a proactive approach to the health, maintenance, and performance of your technology infrastructure can produce significant cost savings for your business. Increased employee productivity, driven by a stable, efficient office network can yield further financial benefits, and avoiding costly downtime and preventable equipment replacement will help you more effectively manage cash flow and stay afloat in a sea of uncertainty and fear.
