4 Aspects of Server Management Your Business Cannot Afford to Ignore

As a business owner of a growing business, how would you feel if –

1. Your front door is locked while your customers are waiting to buy from you.
2. Your employees are idle while there are orders waiting to be processed.
3. Your orders are not being shipped on time.
4. Your whole customer data is wiped out and your backups do not work due to an error.

While the answers may seem obvious, many businesses do not have a process to mitigate these risks. As your business grows, IT infrastructure, which includes your servers, networks and equipment become critical components of your business. In this article we look at some of the most common server or IT infrastructure related issues that affect sales, productivity, customer satisfaction and data loss.

Server inefficiencies are so prevalent in IT infrastructure that some downtime is usually expected. Some companies guarantee a 99.5% uptime, which on paper sounds pretty good. Is it though? 99.5% uptime means your server could be down for over 44 hours a year, which does not sound all that great when you consider that your website, email, business apps or other critical components might be down when you need it the most.

In a recent survey, it was found that over 73% of businesses have suffered some type of downtime. A 7.5 hour downtime of the cloud results in a estimated loss of over 70 Million USD. How do you ensure that your digital assets are available and do not suffer an unexpected outage?

Backups and Restore tests

Your data is an invaluable asset to your business and ensuring its integrity is important. Backups of financial data, employee records, customer information and application code will ensure that you have the ability to revert back to validated content if your server suffers from an outage or data corruption.

Firewalls and Anti-virus

Cybersecurity threats are one of the biggest risks for businesses in 2018. As IT systems get more complex and sophisticated, and as businesses rely more on technology for operations,  hackers and viruses become more advanced and malicious in their attempts to hold businesses hostage. Frequent monitoring of access logs, timely updates of anti-virus software, security audits and ethical hacking processes will go a long way in keeping out the bad guys.

24/7 Monitoring

Monitoring your servers,  reviewing your server access logs , managing patch releases- all executed round-the-clock  on a need basis helps identify risks and threats before they become issues. Traffic spikes or unauthorized login attempts can all be identified and preventive actions taken.  In case of an outage, the monitoring team can take corrective actions so that your customers or employees are not affected.

Patches and Update management

Preventive maintenance on servers ensures that updates to the operating system and applications are applied immediately and consistently, to keep out unauthorized access and secure high uptime.

How Fingent helps improve business continuity, uptime and productivity for small business?

Fingent provides end-to-end server management services for small and mid size organizations. Our services include analysis of your existing IT infrastructure, identification of critical components and expert recommendations about your server architecture to reduce the risk of downtime. Our corrective and preventive maintenance activities, and 24/7 round-the-clock monitoring help discard false alarms, while ensuring that we take action on risks before they become a major issues. We also offer advanced cybersecurity audits and tests that evaluate your servers for exploits and vulnerabilities before hackers can. So together, we take action to mitigate the risk to business due to data loss or downtime.

We offer these sophisticated server management services at an affordable cost to our small and mid sized business clients.  These services have helped them reduce costs, increase productivity and improve customer satisfaction. All this,  at the cost of a matinee movie evening with friends!