First, a story.

It’s 5:38pm. The office is empty except for a few stragglers and workaholics. At the back of the office sits your company’s server. It runs your e-mail. It stores all of your files. It handles your applications. You trust it. You trust the company that comes out once a month to “maintain” it (at $100 an hour). In spite of everything it does, it’s forgotten day-to-day because it just works.

It’s 5:39pm, and an orange light starts blinking on the server. It could be a bad power supply, damaged memory, or a failing hard drive. Unfortunately, the computer company you pay to “maintain” your systems was at your office yesterday. Everything was fine when they were there, and they’re not scheduled to come back for a couple weeks.

The panic didn’t start until the next morning. E-mail was down. No one could access their documents. The accounting system wasn’t working. Chaos. One of the hard drives on the server failed that night, then another, and the entire drive array became corrupted. Workers milled about the office with nothing to do. Productivity dropped to nothing.

The frantic office manager called the computer repair company. The technician arrived in an hour, evaluated the situation, and realized they needed to replace the drives and restore from backup. The drives were ordered (four hour turnaround) and installed. The technician started the restore process. Everything was going to work out…

The second panic of the day started after lunch, when the technician realized the backup tapes were damaged. After a call to a data recovery company, the technician breaks the news to the office manager: “Two weeks.”

What went wrong?

Most companies see technology as a tool. They use their desktops, laptops, and servers to do their jobs. They give as much thought to them as they do their cell phones or office chairs. It’s only when computers break (or stop working entirely) that their value becomes apparent. Even though this company was spending thousands of dollars a year to “maintain” their equipment, their vendor focused on the billable hour instead of what was best for their client. Isn’t there a better way?

Managed IT Services from Plinth Technology

Plinth Technology uses a virtual network operations center service that will monitor and maintain your desktops, laptops, servers and network devices 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The service comes in two forms: Total Desktop/Laptop Care and Total Server Care.