We are asked this question quite often and the best way to describe it is: Managed Services is a way of monitoring, maintaining and supporting business networks – remotely, securely and proactively.  Servers, workstations and networks are not “plug it in and forget it” devices.  Just like your car, they require routine maintenance to keep everything running smoothly.  Just like cars, if you wait until YOU detect the problem, you’re probably facing costs that are not only financial, but also time and resource related. Here are a couple real world examples of situations with our clients in the past week where our Managed Services service really saved the day.  But this is a needed service for your business, regardless of the IT support company you use.

1) We received an alert on Saturday AM about XYZ Lawfirm’s Exchange Server database going offline.  Exchange Server is the master Outlook database of all email, contacts, calendars and other Outlook information for the entire firm.  Within an hour, we had logged onto this server and discovered they had exceeded the default size restriction on the database.  So we increased the limit in the Windows registry then put the database back online and they never knew anything even happened.  Without Managed Services, no one would have realized this problem until one of the firm’s employees realized Outlook data was unavailable (probably on Monday) and contacted us to fix it.  In the meantime, Outlook would have been unavailable for anyone that wanted to work over the weekend and there would have undoubtedly been delays in receiving email.  The  downtime went from potentially 48 hours to 40 minutes and it’s unlikely anyone even noticed there was any downtime at all.

2) We received an alert last Thursday about ABC Lawfirm’s main application server experiencing long disk queue length. This can mean many different things and have many causes but users will notice it because applications will be running slower than normal.  Very soon after receiving this alert, we logged onto their server and began investigating the problem as well as called the Office Administrator to let her know we were working on it.  As it turns out, the cause of this problem was solved by installing a driver update for the RAID (hard drive) controller on the server.  Considerable downtime was again avoided by an early alert and quick response to a problem instead of waiting for users to notice the problem (and probably reboot their computers thinking it’s a workstation problem) then contacting us and we begin investigating without knowing what is going on because we are not monitoring the server.

Any size office may benefit from Managed Services – by proactively monitoring your important technology assets, you can best protect against unexpected breaks that cost you time, energy and money.  You can cover any combination of elements that may be included in your office – workstations, servers, etc. For more information or specific questions, please contact Brian Cluxton at the Columbus office.  bcluxton@affinityconsulting.com