Spring is the perfect time of year to organize your life, have a garage sale, or prepare your landscaping for the summer months, so why not use this time to also make sure your IT infrastructure is ready to boost your business through 2012? Preventive IT maintenance can save your business time, money, and frustration. We’ve put together a list of items you should consider regarding your computer infrastructure.

  1. Improve your backups – One of the most critical items to a business is protecting its assets which include computer data. While most business have some kind of backup solution in place there are many instances where the proper information isn’t being backed up or worse yet the backup isn’t reliable. If you are still using tape drives or old backup software it’s a good time to take a look at upgrading to cloud solutions which should include an offsite backup, onsite backup for fast recovery, and system state backups – not just file based. Hard drives and tape drives have a failure rate of 100% which means at some point in time it will fail. Don’t gamble and just assume that your backups will work for restore, instead take some time to review alternatives before it’s too late.
  2. Replace old computers – The methodology that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” doesn’t always make the most sense. Employee labor costs are typically one of the larger costs of any business and if you can improve employee productivity by putting in faster computers for as little as $600, why wait? Have you considered how much money is wasted by employees waiting for a computer to restart after freezing up, slow program load time, or worse yet waiting for a failed computer to be replaced?
  3. Upgrade servers that are 4+ years old – New servers and virtualization technology which allow for server consolidation can save your company energy costs and employee productivity. Many times companies are running 2-3 servers that, with new technology, could be consolidated onto one server with much faster hardware. Similar to old desktop computers your productivity is limited by the slowest link so just upgrading a desktop computer doesn’t necessarily make your employees more productive.
  4. Evaluate alternatives – Each year technologies change and improve, so what was the right business decision several years ago doesn’t mean it’s the right solution today. Make sure you evaluate options to move parts of your IT infrastructure to the cloud. For example, running an Exchange 2003 server for 10-20 employees isn’t the most cost effective solution and, with emerging cloud technologies, there are some nice alternatives.
  5. IT Support – Where do your employees go now to fix computer problems and how much time is being spent troubleshooting IT issues by your accountants, purchasing managers, and controllers? Are all of your computers covered by up to date anti-virus software and strong network firewalls? Who is performing regular maintenance on your computers, servers, and network? If you don’t know the answer to all these questions it’s probably time to look at Managed Services from an IT services company. There are different degrees of managed services including unlimited help desk, on-site support, software patching, and remote monitoring of workstations and servers.

Interested in implementing any of these recommendations for your business? Contact Layered Systems today for a free evaluation of your IT infrastructure. We will help you determine potential improvements to how your business uses technology.