The Benefits of Proactive Monitoring of IT Services

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

We now no longer have a choice. Operational uptime and business continuity are vital to the survival of all businesses. If you are in doubt, consider the following facts uncovered in surveys undertaken by the Gartner Group:

• 43% of companies that suffered a catastrophic loss of data and IT capability went out of business immediately.
• 51% of companies that suffered a catastrophic loss of data and IT capability went out of business within 2 years.

It is critical to remediate these risks in the face of the ever-evolving Cyber Security threat. Central to this risk management are technologies and processes that are supported by Real Time Proactive Monitoring.

The Legacy Approach to Data and Systems Management

In a reactive support model IT issues are handled in a reactive manner. A problem gets noticed by an end user who then raises it with their internal IT department or support provider. Reactive support does not address real time issues and threats. It suffers from a lack of systemisation, poor visibility and little or no accountability on key security and support concerns.

The result? This leaves you exposed to real time threats, data loss and potentially catastrophic outcomes such as the loss of the key business systems.

Why a Structured Approach to Proactive Monitoring is Critical

Proactive monitoring is an IT industry term that covers the real time monitoring of all of your key IT assets, processes and data management. It requires a detailed understanding of how you use technology in your business so that monitors can be tailored to you needs.

Some forms of proactive monitoring are always on. For example, monitoring of firewalls and other network infrastructure designed to deal with intrusion and threat detection. Other forms of proactive monitoring are rule-driven. For example, checking backups for consistency or deciding what security patches to apply in specific time windows.

Proactive Monitoring and Managed IT Services go Hand in Hand

As more firms move to an outsourced or co-managed It services model, it makes sense to shift the responsibility for proactive monitoring to the managed IT services provider who have the scale, experience and skills to manage this complex set of systems.

Your managed IT services provider should be able to offer full monitoring and management of issues such as:

• Prioritizing and applying patches and hotfixes.
• Managing application licenses and seats.
• Managing hardware warranties and service SLA.
• Monitoring security infrastructure such as firewalls.
• Managing antivirus alerts and ensuring virus definitions are up-to-date.
• Monitoring of resource usage, and intelligent scaling of cloud resources.
• Monitoring the daily backup schedule and ensuring the integrity of backups.

Most importantly of all, your IT provider needs to perform a risk analysis of your business and identify what is critical to your operational uptime. For a high volume transactional business this may be the core ERP solution and a high frequency of backups to protect data. For a professional services firm this is more likely to protect data integrity and the ability to meet deadlines. Each business will have different pressure points and Proactive monitoring needs to be tailored to meet each need.

In Conclusion

When discussing or investigating proactive monitoring for your business ask you provider searching questions about how they can uncover your core risks and how their monitoring solutions can address those risks. More importantly make sure that all monitoring solutions feed directly into your helpdesk and issues remediation solutions. This provides true 360 degree support and issue remediation.

Your IT services company will need to be compliant with all GDPR legislation regarding data security and privacy. They will be able to grandfather this compliance on to your own company, simplifying your compliance efforts significantly.

Overall, shifting to proactive monitoring provides faster and more robust support, administration and management of you technology. This translates into better operational uptime, secure business critical systems and peace of mind among other benefits.

If you need specific details of how proactive monitor can benefit your business, please get in touch with us or call us at 01 664 4190